Sneering at Britain is a favourite hobby of the high-minded American press, says James Marriott in The Times. A long report in The Atlantic recently painted the UK as “somewhere between Airstrip One and one of the less hospitable regions of Mordor”. Britain, it says, is a land “gripped by sclerosis”, of children afflicted with “rickets and scurvy” and benighted locals “extracting their own teeth”, and of people who believe that a luxury hotel is one “costing £200 a night”. On the right, broadcaster Tucker Carlson has called us a “sad soggy welfare state”. And while the New York Times thinks Britain’s far right is “moving into the mainstream”, Elon Musk says Britain is “going full Stalin”. These fierce critics, with their “comically wide range of diagnoses”, should look to their own house first.

Staggeringly rich though it may be, it is America, not Britain, which has become an “unrecognisable basket case”. Much zanier ideas about race and gender can be found on Ivy League campuses than in the Russell Group, and anyone seeking evidence of an ascendant far right are better off looking at the anti-Semites and racists attracted to Maga than at a Reform rally. Unlike the US Congress, the British parliament contains no anti-vaxxers, and for all his faults, Keir Starmer would never have staged a garish martial arts fight in the Downing Street garden. When Musk predicts that “civil war is inevitable”, it sounds like he is talking about the much more severely polarised US. When The Atlantic suggests our problem is nostalgia for “global hegemony” it sounds like the preoccupations of a “nervy superpower” facing an ascendant China. Americans might love to bash Britain. “That’s their problem, not ours.”

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When Vladimir Putin was overheard last year telling Xi Jinping that humans could achieve immortality by periodically replacing their organs, says Bojan Pancevski in The Wall Street Journal, many dismissed it as idle chit chat between ageing autocrats. In fact, Putin’s $26bn longevity initiative has become one of Russia’s flagship scientific projects. Like Silicon Valley billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, the Russian president has long been fascinated with anti-ageing research. The difference is Putin’s quest to stave off decline is now a state-level priority, actively exploring frontier methods which include gene editing, organ printing, growing human organs inside “mini-pigs” and exposure to extremely low temperatures.

Russia’s longevity initiative is spearheaded by two figures close to Putin: his endocrinologist daughter Maria Vorontsova and physicist Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Soviet-era nuclear research centre, who claims science will soon allow humans to replace their body parts “indefinitely”. Suspiciously, these labs aren’t producing much peer-reviewed research – dissident scientist Alexander Ostrovskiy, who pioneered organ printing then quit Russia after the Ukraine invasion, says his former colleagues are “probably telling Putin what he wants to hear to secure funding”. But Putin’s obsession with escaping death and his openness to “unorthodox science” reflect a much older tradition among Russian autocrats. In the 1920s, Soviet polymath Alexander Bogdanov’s experiments with rejuvenating blood transfusions attracted the interest of the Kremlin before killing him at the age of 55. A decade later, Oleksandr Bogomolets organised the world’s first longevity conference and won Joseph Stalin’s praise for research claiming humans could live to 150, before dying at 65. Putin’s own “gerontologist” Vladimir Khavinson promoted unproven “peptide-based anti-ageing therapies” and claimed, based on the Bible, that humans were meant to live to 120. He died in 2024, aged 77.

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
Thomas Mann

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