Britain is not America, and the right shouldn’t forget that

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When British supermarket giant Tesco pulled out of the US in 2013, just six years after opening its first Fresh & Easy store, it was criticized for failing TO appreciate the important differences in the way Americans and Britons shop.

Based on last week’s evidence, a similar charge could be leveled at the American national conservatism movement. Their flagship conference in London, with US speakers including Republican Senator JD Vance and leading British Conservative politicians, was met with more of an irritable glare than a buzz of excitement. Critics IIt included figures on the British centre-right, writing in right-wing publications. How did the organizers judge their target market so badly?

Their first mistake was failing to understand how radical the Republican Party of the United States has become social issuesand how relatively moderate British Conservatives are. From immigration and racial discrimination to the opportunity to uphold tradition or embrace change, British Conservatives are actually closer to US Democrats than Republicans.

“Britain is a Christian nation, or it’s nothing,” said a speaker at the conference. This is new to most British Conservatives, only 24% of whom think being a Christian is important to being truly British, compared with 25% of US Democrats and 53% of Republicans who asked the same question about the be American.

So distinctly different social attitudes don’t exist in a vacuum: they’ve been shaped by very different histories and are reflected in very different realities. The United States fought a civil war over slavery, racial segregation was legal within living memory, and the Ku Klux Klan still exists. Today, America remains much more racially segregated of Great Britain, which is itself far from perfect as far as race is concerned.

Black Americans earn 22% less per hour than their white counterparts. This compares with a black wage deficit of 6% in Britain. Even more serious, while black Americans live four years less than whites, black Britons live longer than their white compatriots.

Another key difference is in the media landscapes. The US is highly fragmented, with no single news provider consumed by more than 25% of the population. Fox News and CNN have the broadest reach, but each is deeply wary of one side of the political divide. In Britain, by contrast, nearly 60% of people regularly consult news from the BBC, and both Labor and Conservative supporters generally trust its output. The polarizing British brands – tabloids and right-wing TV channel GB News – have far less reach than Fox and CNN.

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Culture war rhetoric thrives where there is a history of internal conflict, no shared source of truth, and no challenge to radical views. The failure of last week’s conference should send a clear message to transatlantic culture warriors that the vulnerabilities of the United States and Britain are not always the same.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch