Mitt Romney vs. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Such a small place, this Number 10. And not even a car elevator!

Mitt Romney has made news the past couple of days badmouthing the London Olympics even before they start -- bad news for himself as he starts a mini foreign tour to try to persuade voters back home that he actually has some foreign policy bona fides and can handle himself on the international stage -- but his anti-England/Britain views are hardly new, even if he's been pumping up the so-called "special relationship" between the two countries (promoting Anglo-Saxonism or not) and suggesting, stupidly, that somehow President Obama is insufficiently pro-British.

(Perhaps remembering the name of the leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition would help his credibility a bit. Though of course Romney's party has been the most disloyal opposition back home.)

Indeed, as Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating reminds us, Romney wrote the following in his book No Apology:

England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth's land and a quarter of the earth's population. 

(The [sic] is there because, as Romney should have known, the island isn't called England. England is just a part of the island, along with Scotland and Wales.)

This is an incredibly ignorant view of Britain, but, just to confirm that, I asked my father, who lives in England and, well, let's just say, knows a thing or two (and a hell of a lot more than Mitt) about British history, British politics, and the British economy, what he thought. Here's his response:

Not sure what point Romney was trying to make but the comments area demonstrates how little many (most?) Americans understand about anything outside their own very limited experience. Romney is of course quite correct about the size of our roads (and more importantly parking places); not sure about average house size – maybe he meant houses he's been in! We have indeed lost much of our heavy industry but have thriving "new industry" sectors in pharma, software, design, computer chips, etc. His comments about WW2 are not worthy of comment. I presume he believes that the US actually won the War of 1812!

Which is to say, Romney's an idiot. A super-rich idiot, to be sure, but an idiot regardless. And when it comes to Britain, a country of which I am a citizen, he should really just shut the hell up -- unless, of course, he wishes to expose even more of his abject ignorance of the world.