Land of no hope... and glory (for the wealthy)

As the pound tanks against the dollar, Holly Baxter weighs up if she will ever return to her homeland for good

Britons still bemoan the fact that Americans can’t get fish and chips right but our country has a lot more to feel embarrassed about (Getty/iStock)

Watching the pound tank from across the Atlantic is a strange feeling. All around you, your American friends are celebrating and talking about planning trips “to Europe”. Amid the cacophony, you sit silently, unsure what to think. You get paid in dollars, it’s true; you have a visit planned to the motherland during which everything will surely be more affordable. Yet something about the news hits you right in the national pride. What happened to the persistence and the strength of pound sterling, the currency we clung to even as everyone else reached for the euro? It’s always been worth more than the dollar. It’s always been a respected currency, a steady currency, one that you could rely on. All of a sudden, American commentators on Bloomberg are talking about how the UK is an economy that has “submerged itself”. Even though your wallet is heavier, things feel like they’re looking grim.

As an expat (especially one who, like me, is on a tenuous, non-green card track visa that can be revoked at a whim), you always live with one foot in your adopted country and one in your homeland. You might get used to driving on the right side of the road instead of the left and you might integrate eye-wateringly high medical charges into your everyday life, but you’re still a Brit. You still bemoan the fact that Americans can’t get fish and chips right, or the fact that none of them seem aware of the existence of the rest of Britain outside of central London. You still cheer for Team GB at the Olympics and England during the World Cup.

So when you watch your own country shooting itself in the foot, over and over and over again, you get a little embarrassed. “Did Brexit actually happen?” someone asked me at a party in the East Village a couple of weeks ago. I informed her that yes, it did happen, and no, the consequences haven’t been good. “What was it anyway?” she said, loading up a cracker with Brie. “Some kind of Trump thing?” I paused for a second in knee-jerk self-defensive mode, then considered that the most accurate way to describe it really was, yes, “some kind of Trump thing”.

There was a touch of triumphalism among American liberals when Boris Johnson was prime minister. “Now you have your own Trump!” they would say to me, a glint in their eye. They’d become so used to being the embarrassing uncle on the world stage that everyone secretly wanted to leave. Now, Britain had stood on the table and publicly soiled ourselves. Everyone was temporarily distracted by our idiotic behaviour – and hey, at least the US now has Joe Biden, who despite his many faults is at least a normal human being.

There’s been less interest in Liz Truss, partly because of her lack of bombast and partly because she seems to be failing so fast that no one wants to bother getting to know her. Truly, Truss has woken up inside a Tory’s worst nightmare: the economy’s tanking on her watch, and the reigning monarch died days after meeting with her. You couldn’t make it any worse for the woman if you tried. But of course we know that the country isn’t falling apart around her because of her own personal choices; it’s too early for that. Too many years of Conservative rule have made us all look like complete fools and now everyone’s reaping what was sown. It says something that the high point of British news this year was a queue to see the Queen’s closed coffin and a cartoon depicting Paddington Bear as the grim reaper.

There was a time when my husband and I used to talk about “when we return to the UK”. We had ideas about sticking it out here for a decade or so, traveling across the States, imbibing all New York City had to offer, and then perhaps going back to London or to a nice little country abode on the Cornish or Northumbrian coast. But as time has passed, we’ve come to realise we will probably never return. The US has its problems, but at least it’s headed on a (shaky) upward trajectory after the global low point of Donald Trump. Across the Atlantic, we can only watch in horror as our beloved Britain continues to sink lower and lower, with no signs of rebounding in sight.