As it’s the Fourth of July it’s right and proper that I wish my many readers in the United States a very happy birthday. For over 240 years what started out as a small collection of colonies in large part populated by those who hailed from the British Isles, has striven to be the embodiment of the terms freedom and liberty.

America has given much to the world that the world should be thankful for. Those visionaries who founded the United States created a Constitution that took the best of European philosophical thought and moulded it into a document protecting among other things the citizen’s right to speak, defend themselves, to be protected from arbitrary search or having their property abused by the government. This Constitution has been an inspiration to many other nations who saw what liberty and freedom had created in the United States and wanted similar liberties and freedoms for their nations. The American Constitution has inspired freedom movements throughout the world and even in the United Kingdom, the former colonial power in North America, where there are increasing calls for Britons to have our own equivalent to the American First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech. I have personal reasons to be grateful to the US Constitution and for America, which those close to me know about and I promise that if I see a random American in the pub tonight I’ll buy them a beer because of that.

America has also been the arsenal of democracy and the help that was given by America and its leaders provided Britain and other nations the materiel they needed in order to stand up to both Hitlerism and Communism. I shudder to think what today’s world and especially today’s Europe would have been like but for the Liberty Ships and their cargo in World War II and the American leadership of NATO. Without American help and assistance, there is the strong possibility that Western Europe would have looked today like North Korea with all the horrors that this description implies.

Of course, America is not perfect, no human institution can possibly be perfect, but in the course of nearly two and a half centuries, it has in my opinion, done much more good for the world than it has harm. But, what is interesting is that because of American cultural and intellectual openness, critics of those areas in which America has failed more often than not come from within America and from American’s themselves. It was American’s themselves who said that slavery was wrong and fought a war to suppress this terrible institution. It was Americans who also pushed for the rights of women to vote and for people to be judged not on any immutable characteristic but on the content of their character.

I try to imagine what the world would be like without the commercial, cultural, scientific, political and military contributions to humanity. What comes into my mind when I do this is not a world I would wish onto my descendants. It would be a world without free trade, without Aaron Copeland or Johnny Cash, without the internet and treatments for terrible diseases, without the concept of a people choosing their leader and then that leader peacefully relinquishing power and it would be a world dominated by dictators who would crush democracy at every turn.

I’m British, I love my country, I love my history but I also greatly respect what the United States of America has given the world. I’d like to conclude by wishing all my American readers a very very happy Fourth of July.