To most Americans, the tale of Catherine Wieland will have seemed too outrageous to believe. Claiming she suffered ‘anxiety attacks’ so crippling she couldn’t leave her home or perform basic functions such as washing herself, the 33-year-old from West Sussex was given lavish disability benefits worth about £700 per month.

She also received universal credit, while simultaneously exploiting the infamous Motability scheme: Using a taxpayer-subsidised programme for disabled people, in which she paid a small deposit for the use of a brand-new BMW.

Yet Wieland not only made 76 beauty appointments and visited 60 pubs, clubs and restaurants in the two-and-a-half years she was claiming personal independence payments but happily went abroad, flying to Cancun in Mexico, where she posted pictures of herself zip-lining and surfing.

Wieland was convicted of fraud in March, given a suspended sentence and ordered to repay £23,662 she stole from the taxpayer.

Her case hardly caused much of a stir in Britain – where outrageous benefits cheating is par for the course.

But this week, Wieland made it on to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, America’s biggest-selling newspaper, under the brutal but entirely accurate headline: The Welfare State is Crushing Britain.

But it’s not just the Journal. Barely a week goes by now without distinguished figures in the US media lifting the lid yet again on the horror show they can see unfolding across the Atlantic.

For all the chaos and alleged corruption of the Trump administration, in recent months, commentators, politicians, podcasters and media outlets on both the Left and the Right have kept up a constant chorus arguing that Britain is a country in more or less terminal decline.

When I arrived in New York more than 20 years ago, Britain was generally regarded in the US, especially in liberal circles, as a bastion of sanity – both under Labour and Conservative prime ministers – in an increasingly mad world. Suffice it to say, I cannot remember a time when our transatlantic cousins have had such a downer on the Brits.

Critics bemoan not only the UK’s flagging economy and ever-expanding welfare state but also its hypocrisy over free speech, its feeble and starved Armed Forces and its inability to get to grips with the small boats crisis and the wider issue of mass immigration.

Donald Trump was never keen on Labour governments even before Keir Starmer failed to back the President’s military misadventures in Iran. Trump acidly described the ex-PM as ‘not Winston Churchill’, adding that the so-called ‘special relationship’ is ‘not what it was’.

But in truth, Trump speaks for millions of Americans these days. In years gone by, Democrat friends would regularly roll their eyes at some latest Maga outrage or other and tell me: Well, at least you don’t have to put up with this sort of madness in the UK.

No longer. They increasingly know only too well what the Brits are putting up with.

With self-proclaimed socialists such as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the rise in the Democratic Party and threatening to drag it significantly to the Left, the Republicans nowadays like to use Britain as a cautionary tale of what might happen if they take control of the US.

Ruinous welfare handouts – anathema to many Americans who believe in self-sufficiency and low taxes – top the list.

The Wall Street Journal points out that while the number of working-age British people claiming sickness or disability benefits has now soared to 4.7million – at a faster rate than any Western country – the comparative figure in the US is 10.6million. But America has a population five times bigger than Britain, while its economy is in a far healthier state.

Meanwhile, Americans have been poring over the UK’s dismal economic performance for some time. In June, the liberal Atlantic magazine ran a long investigation – cruelly subtitled ‘a case study in self-sabotage’ – into how Britain ‘became as poor as Mississippi’.

Output per person, a crucial measure of economic wellbeing, had slumped to the point that Britain’s was now only just above that of America’s most impoverished state, the Atlantic noted, adding: ‘Who broke Britain? Someone – or something – must have.’

Predictably, Brexit got some of the blame but the article’s American author (whose train out of London, needless to say, broke down) went on to note witheringly that the rapid succession of prime ministers ‘do not seem to be getting more talented over time’. Ultimately, the Atlantic concluded, the British themselves broke Britain.

Defence is another crucial issue. Back in March, many patriotic Americans were appalled at Britain’s underwhelming military response to a drone attack on a UK airbase in Cyprus. Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon took a week to be taken out of dry dock and get to the Mediterranean – only to develop power and propulsion problems on the way.

‘What happened to Britain’s Royal Navy?’ pondered a headline in the Washington Times.

Military sources in the US capital later revealed that America had ‘long-standing’ concerns about the UK’s ability to send warships to sea in an emergency.

Earlier this month, the sudden decision to withdraw all its heavy bombers from RAF Fairford after the confused response to a suspected Iran-backed terror plot suggested it wasn’t just Britain’s fleet but also its air bases that are worrying our American allies.

Britain’s respect, or lack of it, for free speech – a freedom that Americans take very seriously – was back in the news only last week.

The announcement that the UK’s ‘police watchdog’ had found that comedy writer Graham Linehan may have been unfairly arrested at Heathrow over remarks about trans issues on social media will have stirred memories of an incident that struck many Americans at the time as invidious.

Linehan’s original arrest in September last year created shockwaves in the US where many argued that it made a mockery of then Sir Keir’s blase assurance to his Oval Office hosts a few months earlier that ‘we’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time’.

He gave this assurance shortly after Trump’s vice-president JD Vance attended the Munich Security Conference and rattled off various cases in the UK that he said proved free speech was ‘in retreat’ there.

The US State Department subsequently published a report claiming that human rights in Britain have ‘worsened’ over the past year, citing ‘serious restrictions’ on free speech.

The Linehan arrest rather bore out what the Trump administration had been saying.

A point reiterated by an influential historian and conservative commentator, Michael Barone, made clear days later in a widely-syndicated column headlined: ‘Britain, Land of the Unfree’.

‘Surely, many Americans reading this must be thinking this was some terrible mistake. A one-off as the British might say,’ said Barone of Linehan’s jaw-dropping treatment. ‘Actually not. It’s more like standard operating procedure.’

Barone also criticised UK officialdom’s controversial crackdown on displays of the St George’s flag – a policy that would be anathema in the US, where towns compete to fly the biggest Stars and Stripes.

It was part of a silencing of dissent over immigration, he said, that had led to the widespread rejection of both Labour and Conservative parties in favour of the more openly patriotic Reform.

Under Trump, on the other hand, America has succeeded in stemming the flood of illegal migrants over the Mexican border that got under way during the Democrats’ administration.

Consequently, Britain’s continued failure to stop small boats crossing the Channel – a policing operation covering a border a fraction of the nearly 2,000-mile-long US-Mexico boundary – is an issue that I have found ordinary Americans sometimes find puzzling.

Lacking even the excuse that it has Donald Trump in charge, Britain’s waning fortunes will continue to distract and alarm my friends and neighbours here – who don’t even need to try to take a British train to know that something’s gone badly wrong across the pond.