The spread of British decline porn

Why do Americans have such a bad image of our perfectly run country?

One thing I really noticed on my recent trip to the United States was how darkly everyone seemed to view Britain. From Washington politicos who described it as an asylum run by the lunatics, to a gun store owner in South Carolina who couldn’t understand how you could go to jail for tweeting, advising me to ‘get my family out’, and a South American taxi driver who asked if it was true that ‘the Arabs’ had taken over Britain, adding apologetically that this is what he’d seen online.

Some of this seemed a little perverse: South Carolina has a murder rate seven or eight times that of Britain, while America’s large cities are much more violent and, in many cases, rundown and shabby looking, with a notable drug and homeless problem.

Yet New York’s edginess is part of the package, and even attractive to many, while in contrast overseas visitors don’t usually come to London to experience the thrill of urban squalor. Britain’s selling point has traditionally been its orderliness: low crime, unarmed police, cyclists who apologise after you run them over, pretty Georgian squares and historic, lively pubs. Britain’s advantage lies both in its Ruritanian charm, but also its reputation for being tolerant, liberal (in the old sense) and understated. It has an incredible array of cherished institutions and locations, from Wimbledon to Albertopolis and Glyndebourne, not to mention dozens of castles and stately homes managed by the National Trust and English Heritage.

The image was boosted by a tremendous exertion of cultural power in the late 20^th century, projected by Tolkien, James Bond, the Beatles and its most profitable soft power export, Harry Potter. If we just expanded the Warner Studios and turned the entire Watford area into a gigantic Hogwarts theme park, we’d rake it in.

That perhaps explains why Americans are so shocked by the state of the country now, and why many are so obsessed with British decline. This has created an entire social media industry described as ‘decline porn’, the subject of a recent Spectator Americano podcast episode, during which I confessed I’m probably not entirely innocent on this front, describing myself as ‘the Bonnie Blue of decline porn’.

Who’s been spreading this negative image of Britain? It’s a mystery

(To overseas readers, Bonnie Blue is a woman who gained notoriety by having sex with 1,000 men in one go, becoming emblematic of the very Weimar Germany atmosphere in 2020s Britain.)

Some Americans may be influenced by depressing British commentators who express a sense of decline and despair, but in truth the impact of decline literature is probably considerably less influential than decline video. For many foreigners, whose impression of Britain was shaped positively by the age of film, now see it in a much darker lighter in the age of short-form video.

Short-form media, which has become so overwhelmingly dominant in our consumption habits, seems especially bad for Britain’s image. So many people who had a comforting idea of the country are now presented with footage of people fighting with machetes in places like Croydon, or run-down northern towns half-transformed into Lahore. Elon Musk’s monetisation of Twitter has also created incentives for independent content producers to exaggerate the problem, with many presenting a misleading picture of life here (one was recently accused of altering a street scene to make it look both more Islamic and menacing.)

As an illustration of how short form video affects our impressions, Japanese nationalists are apparently sharing this clip of two British women contrasting their experiences, one in London and the other in their country. Japan, in fact, has probably benefitted from the proliferation of short-form video, much of it showing the civility of life there, and this may explain in part its steep rise in tourism since Covid (although the weak yen is surely the largest factor).