In February 2001, Timothy Garton Ash asked ‘Is Britain European?’ He argued that Britain had long since abandoned the national perspective  of a self-satisfied little island at the heart of a great empire: ‘But it is not clear whether what has replaced it is Europeanisation, Americanisation or just globalisation.’ Quite so. A leading political philosopher, John Gray, has attacked Labour’s commitment to the United States as ‘the paradigmatic modern country, which Britain should take as a model’. In contrast Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian journalist, has written an entire volume dedicated to teaching Britons how to ‘live the American dream’, first by eliminating the monarchy and then by installing a republic based on the US  Constitution.