I really like the US. It is the American dream I cannot stand. The idea that "you can be whatever you want to be" has always struck me as a self-evident untruth. And yet it is a myth that even leftwing American politicians cling to tenaciously.

Jesse Jackson, the first black American to run for the presidency, once said of US students: "If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude."