Is Britain the puppet of the USA?

The former Conservative MP and government minister Neil Hamilton - now the Deputy Chairman of UKIP - has written an essay in a national newspaper about the ISIS threat.

What interests me particularly about it is this quote:

From the 1930s the US was determined to destroy the British Empire and then enmesh us in the EU, seeing Atlanticist Britain as the agent of US foreign policy and free market economics.

I am not sure I have ever heard an establishment figure make such a remark before.

Britain has changed a lot since the 1930s.  In those days, Britain had an empire, and so far as I can make out no one minded.  Not one political party in this country supported abolishing the empire - apart from the Labour Party very briefly - and neither am I aware of any public clamour for abolition.  Britain seemed also to be its own country in those days, entering both the First World War and the Second World War before the Americans did.

Nowadays we have long since let go of our empire, and we seem to be obsessed with following the USA into illegal wars.

I am not sure about Hamilton's reference to free market economics.  So far as I am aware, successive governments in the USA have thrown one subsidy after another at their biggest companies, and yet in a genuine free market there would be no subsidies whatever.

As for the EU, I am not sure I have ever before heard anyone argue for the involvement of the Americans in its foundation and development.  I had always understood that countries like Germany and Holland and Belgium were the guiding lights.

If Britain is a puppet of the USA, as Hamilton seems to imply, then why has Britain long since abolished the death penalty while most states of the USA have not?  Why has Britain never adopted a written constitution like that of the USA?  Why are our senior judges not appointed on a blatantly partisan basis?

Either way, the policy objectives of both the United Kingdom and the USA in recent decades seem to me to have been riddled with inconsistency, and it is hard to discern an underlying logic.  Maybe that is part of the reason why they now seem impotent in the face of the ISIS threat.  It is not that they no longer know what to do, but rather that they never had a clue in the first place.

Related previous posts include:
MH17 and Gaza: more lives lost to western imperialism
Air strikes against Iraq are wrong