Extremism emanating from the US is a threat to traditional British values and needs to be laughed out of town - Andy Brown

The British don’t tend to like extreme ideologies and there is a healthy level of distrust for anyone who claims to offer simple answers to complex issues. When someone puts forward a theory there is a strong tendency for us to ask for pesky things like a bit of proof.

We also don’t much like aggressive arguments put forward by people who have complete conviction that they have a monopoly on the truth. There is a healthy tradition of listening carefully to what others have to say and keeping some of our thoughts to ourselves when we think too much nonsense is being spoken.

We tend to prefer to agree to disagree and to avoid talking too strongly about religion or politics in ways that offend others. It took a couple of hundred years but eventually the country tired of burning at the stake people who believed in a different religion and there has never been a mass clamour to bring it back. At our best we are also remarkably comfortable at living with people from a range of cultures and a range of views and tend to celebrate those differences instead of nursing resentments and suspicions about them. Few of us like narrow conformity.

As a result, we’ve seen massive improvements to the nation’s enjoyment of great food and many have been very grateful to be looked after by some wonderfully diverse people working in services like the NHS.

All of these good values are increasingly coming under threat from some very unpleasant attitudes of mind that are becoming dominant in the States. It is entirely possible that the next President of the United States will uphold a set of values that most of us in this country are deeply uncomfortable with and that attempts will be made to introduce those attitudes into British life.

Donald Trump doesn’t do a lot of listening. He doesn’t tend to change his mind when he hears new information. He isn’t remotely interested in cross party collaboration. Facts are just a bit of a nuisance for him if they go counter to his fixed opinions.

In the 2020 US elections 81,283,501 people voted for Joe Biden. 74,223,975 voted for Donald Trump. In other words, he lost by over seven million votes. But that didn’t stop him ringing an election official to try and bully him into finding enough votes to help him scrape a victory in the Electoral College. Or declaring the election was stolen and firing up a crowd to go and wreck the House of Congress.

This is behaviour that has more in common with Putin’s Russia than it does with American traditions of freedom and democracy.

It is unfortunately not behaviour that is the product of the mind of one individual. Behind and around Donald Trump there are some equally dark forces. Extreme evangelical churches don’t bear much resemblance with what goes on in most British religious gatherings. Enthusiasm for the free accessibility of guns has reached such a pitch that it is considered dangerously radical for a US politician to want to stop people with a history of mental illness from buying an automatic weapon. Hidden internet influencers receive huge amounts of funding to insert extremist views into social media conversations.

We may share a language with the US but increasingly the set of attitudes which is emerging there looks dangerously similar to what emerged in Europe in the 1930s. Our nation’s reluctance to get drawn into sharing extremist ideas is about to be tested.

Politicians whose ideas have failed in this country can now travel to the States and get very well paid for telling extremists that they will champion their agenda. When they return to our country to explain why they have sold their souls so cheaply some will no doubt be tempted to follow them and be taken in by their new enthusiasm for daft far right political theories.

It is to be hoped that the rest of the nation will prove to be considerably more sensible and will maintain our longstanding traditions of being rather cynical about extremist ideas that promise to cure all of our problems if we just fall in behind some arrogant leader or some silly right wing theories.

Let us trust that we will prove able to stick to our traditions and laugh these extremists out of town as we vote them out of office.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.