Surdy first began following American politics during the 2020 election, which he said many of his friends and peers in the UK paid close attention to as well.
An outgrowth of a globally connected information source is the transfer of political interest and influence (beyond pop culture) to other countries in ways that wouldn't have happened in the past. From the Economist in 2022:
British politics is obsessed with America. mps, wonks and journalists gorge on American history and follow its politics in fine detail. They also ape its language. Local elections, when council voters decide who has the privilege of collecting bins and cutting services to pay for social care, are sometimes called “mid-terms”. Parts of Britain are occasionally labelled “flyover country”, even if 90% of the population lives within a four-hour drive of Northampton."
Then there was the Canadian trucker protests, in which some cited their "First Amendment rights":
Tamara Lich, the Alberta woman whose GoFundMe campaign raised over $10 million for the convoy, and her husband had their day in court—and Dwayne Lich said he was innocent, because: “Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my First Amendment, I thought that was part of our rights.”
The judge then asked, “What do you mean, First Amendment? What’s that?”
Because, of course, the First Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution, not the Canadian Charter.
The British fascination with America is indeed quite fascinating.
I think Britain recently even decided to get a Supreme Court. You have British politicians now talking about the independence of the judiciary* and other philosophical ideas that are present frequently in American discourse but I guess is new for Britain now that they recently got an independent Supreme Court.
*This, by the way, happened in a Prime Minister's Questions thing a few years ago. Jeremy Corbyn asked PM Theresa May if she would respect the "independence of the judiciary" regarding some UK Supreme Court ruling and PM May said she would.
It's not really that surprising. America is the superpower gepolitically aligned to the UK and the importance more so in the face of waning British influence. To put it blunt: 'what happens over there matters over here'.
As for the SCOTUK, they have been effectively independent as Law Lords for decades, appointed for life, unremovable, etc etc. What they got was a title change and a new building and removed from voting on legislation.
The independence of the judiciary stuff has always been the case, it's just rarely been newsworthy until recent cases - we've been doing some fairly fundamental legal restructuring. They've never been influenceable by the government post appointment.
Blackstone wrote approvingly of constitutional arrangements under which ‘each branch [is] armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous’ (Commentaries, Introduction, § 2). Of course, the branches were different.
The Supreme Court is superficially, by nomenclature, an Americanism. But I am yet to see any convincing argument that its jurisprudence has meaningfully been Americanised. It was in the Appellate Committee, not the Supreme Court, that in R (Jackson) v Attorney General Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope in obiter expressed some doubt as to the Diceyan notion of parliamentary sovereignty. The independence of the Appellate Committee was not new. It was, perhaps, rather casually treated (‘Prologue’, Stevens, The independence of the judiciary) and under-theorised. But no non-law Lord has tried to vote since the 1880s. Reference to judicial independence is hardly a novelty.
Have British jurisprudence and constitutional discourse been Americanised in substance? Perhaps, but you make no, and hardly even advert to, such an argument.
An outgrowth of a globally connected information source is the transfer of political interest and influence (beyond pop culture) to other countries in ways that wouldn't have happened in the past. From the Economist in 2022:
British politics is obsessed with America. mps, wonks and journalists gorge on American history and follow its politics in fine detail. They also ape its language. Local elections, when council voters decide who has the privilege of collecting bins and cutting services to pay for social care, are sometimes called “mid-terms”. Parts of Britain are occasionally labelled “flyover country”, even if 90% of the population lives within a four-hour drive of Northampton."
https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/05/19/uksa-an-obsessi...
Then there was the Canadian trucker protests, in which some cited their "First Amendment rights":
Tamara Lich, the Alberta woman whose GoFundMe campaign raised over $10 million for the convoy, and her husband had their day in court—and Dwayne Lich said he was innocent, because: “Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my First Amendment, I thought that was part of our rights.”
The judge then asked, “What do you mean, First Amendment? What’s that?”
Because, of course, the First Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution, not the Canadian Charter.
https://www.thebulwark.com/no-the-canadian-trucker-protests-...
(Apparently, there is a first amendment in the Canadian Constitution, but it is the right to recognize Manitoba as a province.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitoba_Act,_1870