It always suprises me to see how many people are prepared to view Blair as Bush's lapdog or call Britain the U.S's "trained monkey" (no direct quote from anyone on here). Personally, I can't abide Blair and firmly believe that he and his evil cow of a wife have sold us out for as much money as they can possibly make, but this constant braying of how we kowtow to America denigrates us all as a nation.
In my view, when you have an alliance, there will always be one or more parties who have more to offer, more wealth, more resource, etc and so you have a party that will be seen as being the stronger. It's the same here, America IS that stronger ally and we do need them (I expect there to be howls of derision at this but it's my belief), more so than we need Europe, who, lets face it, we can barely communicate with due to language barriers.
Perhaps people would be happier for us to ally ourselves with, say, Burkina Faso which would allow us to call upon them to do our dirty work, when we decided to go and liberate Eire (for example)
Howard as our PM? he'd probably only get beaten down by the Cherie Blairs of this country