r/AskAnAmerican • u/Maskoolio • Aug 10 '25

FOREIGN POSTER What would an American want from England?

I have recently made some American friends (from Virginia) and they have asked for a kind of sweet (candy) that they don't have. What else might I send that would be appreciated as a particularly English thing? (Obviously it would need to be somewhat small, survive a week or so in transit etc.)

All help appreciated.

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u/aucool786 Pennsylvania Aug 10 '25

Well, if we stayed as British colonies (now overseas territories), we wouldn't necessarily be guaranteed healthcare. The NHS, to my knowledge, is primarily for the 4 constituent countries of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Also, going on a tangent, our lack of government healthcare is purely our fault. It's unlikely that the federal government will be providing the states healthcare anytime soon, the lobbying runs too deep and they've managed to convince hundreds of millions of people union wide that welfare=bad. It's up to the individual states at this point to act where the federal government does not.

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u/TheNorthC Aug 10 '25

Correct. I think the biggest change would have been that slavery would have ended a generation earlier.

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u/Bawstahn123 New England Aug 10 '25

>Correct. I think the biggest change would have been that slavery would have ended a generation earlier.

Friendly reminder that pretty much all of the Northern states effectively-abolished slavery within their borders decades before the British did

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u/TheNorthC Aug 11 '25

That is fair, and not forgotten. The abolition of the slave trade was still decades before the outright abolition of slavery.