Apparently there’s been a decline in tourism to America from the UK, with what Travel and Tour World sums up as “a combination of controversial policies, global conflicts, and anti-tourism sentiments driving a notable decline in interest.” A recent survey by Holiday Extras finds that 17 percent of British travellers have pledged to avoid the United States in 2025 due to President Trump’s return to the White House.

“This marks the first time an overseas election has significantly influenced travel preferences among Brits, comparable to the impact of global conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine,” notes the head of public affairs at Holiday Extras, Seamus McCauley. “Since 2023, issues like climate events and global unrest have shaped travel trends, but this is the first election-driven disruption we’ve seen at this scale.”

Really? I think it’s just one of those things people say to feel virtuous, because somewhere else is cheaper or nearer. I grew up in a time and place — 1970s England — where the favorite holiday destination of my compatriots (including my own Communist father) was run by an actual Fascist dictator; Generalissimo Franco’s Spain.

These days many young people — especially those “influencers” who pay petulant lip-service to the reactionary nature of Mr. Trump — travel to and often reside in Dubai, which was partially built by immigrant indentured servitude and where homosexuality is illegal. And no, you won’t get around that law by calling yourself “queer’ or ‘trans-folx.’”

There was a major television advertising campaign over here last year by Visit California, with the theme “The Ultimate Playground.” It marked the first rebrand in over a decade and featured a soundtrack of ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky” — supposedly the happiest song of all time.

“Let’s Play”we mulish Brits were urged as a beach ball (invented in 1930s California) bounced to the towering sequoias of the north from the beaches of  Southern California. Yet I’m not sure how much weight a beach ball carries when we’ve all read about the California Exodus which has driven the mass emigration of many former California dreamers to Texas and Florida.

I am not questioning the veracity of the claim in a study by the U.S. National Institute for Play that 83 percent of UK travellers actively seek experiences that bring joy and happiness when they are on vacation. Yet I do wonder whether we’ll be up for taking a flight of more than eleven hours when, despite the hand-wringing of the anti-Brexit Remoaners, it’s still so easy to hop on a plane to hot mainland Europe most of the year round, or whether we’ll read the reports of the Golden State’s homelessness and street drug abuse problem and think “I can stay at home and get that.”

When people talk about the Special Relationship, it wasn’t just one kind of love. There was the most serious form it took, when in fighting the Nazis together (despite Lend-Lease) it was a time of real heroism and fraternity. Yet there was also a time when it was the cultural crush to end them all.

That after we had blitzed buildings and food rationing (the ubiquity of bomb-sites in swinging Sixties fashion photography never fails to surprise me, while the lack of fat people is remarkable) and you apparently had a land of milk and honey and Elvis and Marilyn.

Even in the 1980s, we were still getting unduly excited about McDonald’s and Levi’s; I’d say the last gasp of our Yank-idolatry was the mad craze for Baywatch in the early ‘90s  before Britpop specifically decreed that it was uncool to want to be American.

There may be an American Dream for the huddled masses trying to get in from the developing world, but it’s fair to say the West doesn’t dream of America as a destination or destiny any more. It’s more seen as a newly awoken beast, previously kept as one of those sad defanged ex-circus pets, which is growing back to vitality before our half impressed, half disapproving eyes.

The U.S. — despite starting the culture war by encouraging nonsense in academia — has a deeply embedded history of freedom which touches Brits when they actually experience it. Perhaps the main, quite boring reason why British people don’t envy Americans any more is that our commercial culture is pretty much in line with the Yanks.

When I was growing up there were all sorts of things one could get in America but not here, and your food was way more fun and varied than ours, but that’s not the case anymore; not so much because we did anything clever, more because we import so much of your stuff. Which certainly bodes well for tariffs.