What have Britons got against America?
Americano
The Spectator
4.0 • 762 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
British favourability dropped sharply sometime around 2016 and then further declined in 2024. Trump is clearly the main driver of negative feelings, although not the only one. There was much antipathy in 2020, which may have been related to the election but seems more likely due to the chaotic scenes that followed George Floyd’s death. To discuss this, Freddy Gray is joined by Ed West, who has written about this for his Substack The Wrong Side of History.
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Transcript
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| 0:33.7 | Hello and welcome back to the Americana Show. My name is Freddie Gray. I am the deputy editor of the |
| 0:41.3 | spectator and the US editor. And I'm pleased to tell you that this is the 10th year of the |
| 0:47.7 | Americano podcast. And I think it's fair to say it's been a fairly fascinating time in American politics, life and culture. |
| 0:57.5 | And that's what we talk about every episode on this podcast. So please keep listening and provide as |
| 1:03.9 | much feedback as you like. Today I am delighted to be joined by the great Ed West, who is author of, I always want to call it the West is history, because it's not. |
| 1:19.1 | I would like to call it that. |
| 1:20.0 | It's called the wrong side of history. |
| 1:21.2 | The wrong side of history, substack, which is brilliant. |
| 1:23.9 | And he has done another typically excellent, entertaining and informative piece about anti-Americanism in Britain. |
| 1:32.5 | And it's a bit of a sort of pet subject for this podcast because it's a British podcast about America. |
| 1:38.5 | But I was very interested by your opening statistic, which was that, or opening fact, which is that America now polls worse than Saudi Arabia in British public opinion. |
| 1:48.4 | Yeah, it's down there with your North Korea's, your Israelis, all the kind of most hated countries. |
| 1:53.8 | And it's probably because, as you explained in the piece, it's long been just a sort of socially acceptable thing, even an encouraged thing by educational institutions and so on, |
| 2:02.8 | to hate America and regard it as a, as a, not quite the great Satan, but a malign force in the world. |
| 2:10.7 | Yeah, I mean, I start the obvious fact that Trump is obviously a big fact here. |
| 2:14.5 | You can see that the polling goes down in 2016, 2015, |
... |
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