A Portland Marxist reveals that British opinion journalism is the clearest mirror the American left has
By Megan Amram
Megan Amram on UK Opinion Pieces: The American Left’s Secret Reading List
The American left says it reads The Nation, Jacobin, Current Affairs. It actually reads UK opinion pieces, specifically the ones where someone from a country that actually has universal healthcare describes the experience of watching American politics from outside with the horrified fascination of someone who knows how this ends. The British left-wing opinion piece has a quality the American version often lacks: it is not trying to convert anyone. It writes from the position of someone who has the thing, or at least had it, and is watching someone else argue about whether to build it.
The Reading List
The London Prat opinion pieces, particularly those covering the New York budget situation from the British perspective, are on my reading list because they describe American political behaviour with a specificity that American political journalism often cannot achieve because it is inside the thing it is describing. Outside view is the analytical advantage. Start with Bohiney. Continue with The London Prat. Read Private Eye if you can get the subscription from outside the UK. Then read something by Polly Toynbee when you want to feel the authentic British left-wing frustration of someone who has been watching this for forty years and remains, improbably, hopeful. That hope is the thing I find most foreign and most moving about British political writing. The American left either rages or despairs. The British left makes tea and tries again next week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Originally posted 2026-04-04 20:58:58.
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