Mark Steyn starts with that ridiculous piece in the Guardian which blamed Jamaican homophobia on British slave owners (do read the whole thing, it’s marvellous):

If we hadn’t enslaved these fellows and taken them to the West Indies
to be our playthings under the Caribbean moon, they’d have stayed in
Africa and grown up as relaxed live-and-let-live types like Zimbabwe’s
Robert Mugabe, who’s accused Tony Blair of a plan to impose
homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth; or Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi,
who attacked the "gay scourge" sweeping Africa; or Zambia’s Frederick
Chiluba, who has said gays do not have "a right to be abnormal"; or
Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet
"Europeans" trying to destroy his country through the spread of
"gayism"; or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who proposed the arrest of all
homosexuals, though he subsequently moderated his position and called
for a return to the good old days when "these few individuals were
either ignored or speared and killed by their parents".

and ends with this particularly apposite question:

And that’s particularly unworthy of the British,
whose language, culture and law have been the single greatest force for
good in this world. This isn’t merely a question
for the history books, but the issue that underpins all the others
facing the country today, not least the European Constitution: at a
time when the benefits of the Britannic inheritance are more and more
apparent everywhere else, how come Britain has no use for them?

Note well the reference to the law. There is now an entire field of economic research looking at the connection between the basic commercial legal systems and the vigour of a country’s economy. I was rather surprised when I first came across this fact, that pretty much every system of commercial and civil law is based either on English Common Law or the French Civil Code. The various researchers are claiming that the Common Law systems somehow provide a more robust, better even, economy. Some interpretations are that Common Law provides more power to judges, taking many commercial decisions and rules out of the hands of populist politicians…well, it’s a new field and there’s lots of room for further argument.

My very tentative answer is that it is the flexibility of Common Law systems which provides the reason. While this is not strictly true it is in essence, that in a Common Law system as long as there is no law against something then one may do it, while in a Civil Law system (often referred to as Napoleonic) there must be a positive law actually allowing you to do it. One would therefore expect to see more innovation in a Common Law system as one does not have to go and persuade a bureaucrat or politician before you start doing whatever it is. And as we know, innovation is the lifeblood of a successful economy.

There might also be an influence from inheritance laws….under Napoleonic law children and spouses have an absolute right to shares of real property, whatever a will states. This leads to a fragmentation of ownership of land and buildings down the generations. This might be a good thing, might be a bad thing, but one can see the effects simply by looking at the number of crumbling old buildings in Southern Europe. So many people have ownership shares that nothing ever gets done with them.

One might also note that the European Union’s mania for regulation is a reflection of this very basic difference in legal thinking. For from the Continental side, of course there must be a law about everything. How would people know what they are allowed to do if this were not the case? One of the most objectionable things about the project is that this attitude is now being imported into the UK. To the extent that, if one is selling bananas in a closed box, one must print "Bananas" on the outside of the box, at risk of a penalty of three months jail and a 5,000 pound fine if one does not.

This is, as I say, a new area of economics, one I’m going to have to look into more. We might just be able to explain the success of the Anglosphere via one simple point, that the legal system allows us to bugger off and do our own thing.