As a Yank, I cannot help thinking the courts have managed to offend common sense far more profoundly than any nickname ever could, writes the US columnist
As a proud Yank who has spent decades defending the Special Relationship, advising the US House Foreign Affairs Committee on Anglo-American relations, and writing for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, my eyes couldn't have rolled back further as I read about a recent Scottish employment tribunal.
An American employee at a Pizza Express in Aberdeen was awarded compensation after a colleague told him to "go back to your country, you f***ing Yank." No decent employer should tolerate that sort of behaviour. It was rude, vulgar and unprofessional.
But Britain's legal establishment chose to do something altogether different. It transformed an ugly workplace insult into a case of racial harassment because it was directed at the employee's American nationality.
As an actual American, allow me to say something that appears to have escaped the lawyers.
Parliament may have chosen to define race broadly enough to include nationality for the purposes of discrimination law. That is a matter for legislators. What is remarkable is the increasingly expansive way in which that definition is being interpreted, turning what most ordinary people would recognise as a nasty personal exchange into an issue of racial victimhood.
This is where common sense parts company with legal orthodoxy.
There is a profound difference between condemning bad behaviour and redefining it as racism. Increasingly, Britain's institutions appear unable—or unwilling—to recognise that distinction. Every unpleasant interaction becomes a protected-characteristic dispute. Every insult is elevated into an identity grievance. Every disagreement acquires constitutional significance.
The deeper problem is not one tribunal or one claimant. People are free to take offence if they wish. What should concern the rest of us is a legal culture increasingly prepared to validate subjective feelings with the authority of the courts. When institutions reward hypersensitivity rather than resilience, they inevitably encourage more of it.
Historically, Britain did not become one of the world's great democracies because its people demanded protection from every slight. It became great because it cultivated confidence, humour and proportion. This is the country that gave us parliamentary Government, Magna Carta, the common law and the stiff upper lip. It is the nation whose wit has filled books, theatres and television screens for generations. Britons once understood that robust societies are not built by constantly expanding the boundaries of offence.
As someone who loves Britain, I find this cultural shift infinitely more depressing than the remark itself.
The irony is impossible to ignore. "Yankee" began life as a British insult directed at rebellious American colonists. Americans promptly embraced it. "Yankee Doodle," intended as mockery, became one of the defining songs of the American Revolution. That is what confident nations do. They refuse to surrender their identity to those seeking to insult them.
Somewhere along the way, Britain seems to have forgotten that lesson.
What astonishes me is not that one individual felt aggrieved. Human beings are endlessly capable of taking offence. Rather, it is that the legal establishment increasingly seems willing to treat ordinary workplace unpleasantness as evidence of systemic discrimination. This is evidence of institutions drifting steadily away from the instincts of ordinary people.
The Special Relationship has never depended upon carefully managed sensitivities. It has thrived because Brits and Yanks have always spoken to one another with a mixture of affection, irreverence and mutual respect. We have survived revolutions, world wars, terrorist attacks and global crises together. Surely we can survive an American being called a Yank.
Britain faces genuine challenges: stagnant economic growth, unprecedented migration, mounting pressure on public services, geopolitical instability and serious questions about national cohesion. Against that backdrop, it is extraordinary that legal time and public resources are devoted to adjudicating whether an American has been subjected to racial harassment because someone called him a "f***ing Yank."
Britain's greatness was never built upon encouraging people to see themselves as victims. It was built upon producing citizens confident enough to laugh, argue, disagree and move on. That is the Britain Americans have admired for generations. It is the Britain I still believe exists beneath the growing layers of legal activism and institutional fragility.
