The Null Device

On his recent trip to Washington, British PM Gordon Brown gave President Obama a penholder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of the one whose wood formed the desk of the Oval Office. In return, Obama gave Brown a box set of classic American films, seemingly not realising that Brown can't actually watch them because they're Region 1, and Number 10's amenities presumably don't extend to a £20 off-brand multi-region DVD player. And, of course, with both Brown and Obama being obliged to give lip service to maximalist interpretations of copyright laws, neither could publicly condone circumventing lawful restrictions such as DVD region coding. Oops!

Jeremy Clarkson, meanwhile, has a rather witty take on it, which turns into a rubbishing of the unequal terms of Britain's "special relationship" with the US:

Gordon gave Obama Barrack a penholder carved from the timbers of an antislavery ship. The sister ship, in fact, of the one that was broken up and turned into the desk in the Oval Office. Barrack, meanwhile, gave Brown The Graduate on DVD. Which smacks of an “Oh, Christ. What shall we get him?” moment at the local petrol station.

¶ atlanticism barack obama copyfight dvd jeremy clarkson oops uk usa 2

In what could be a further sign of strained relations between Airstrip One and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, Britain's Chancellor Gordon Brown announces plans to adopt US-style economic policies, moving away from the inefficiency of Eurosocialism, whilst promising to maintain a third way, tempering laissez-faire zero-friction capitalism with some degree of "social justice".

Could we be witnessing the start of the breakdown of Britain's membership in the EU? Commentators have been suggesting for a while that Britain has more culturally in common with Calvinist/capitalist America than with the wine-drinking, bureaucracy-choked welfare states of Europe, with some suggesting that Britain would belong more within the United States than in the EU.

(Hypothetical scenario: if Britain was to leave the EU and join the United States, how could the arrangement be made to work? Would England, Wales and Scotland be three states, would they be divided into smaller states, or would the U.S. federation have to be reengineered to accommodate the larger entities? What would the major issues of contention be?)

¶ anglocapitalism atlanticism uk 3