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British Consul General Andrew Staunton spent most of October back home visiting family in the United Kingdom he hadn’t seen in two years due to COVID-related travel bans.
But the self-professed “sport-a-holic” still found himself taking advantage of rare opportunities to cheer to victory two Atlanta sports teams he has adopted since arriving here in 2018.
As the Atlanta Braves took on the Houston Astros in the early games of baseball’s World Series, the time difference forced Mr. Staunton to tune in around 3 a.m. to hear the final inning. Headphones on, wife already asleep, he logged in online to Atlanta’s own 680 The Fan AM radio station to see how each contest came out.
Back in Atlanta for game five, which the Braves dropped to miss the chance at winning the series at home, Mr. Staunton was nonetheless gratified to see them clinch the title in Houston two days later on Nov. 2.
“But as a sports fan, even until the final out, when it was 7-0. I was wondering about the Georgia curse,” he said, speaking like a true jaded Atlanta sports fan during a Global Atlanta Consular Conversation interview at the law offices of Miller & Martin PLLC.
Mr. Staunton has latched on to sports as a way to underscore the cultural connections between the U.K. and the U.S., opening new doors at a time that both sides aim to reinvigorate their bilateral partnership.
Earlier in the month, Mr. Staunton had been at English Premier League soccer (football) club Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium to watch an unusual contest: the Atlanta Falcons taking on the New York Jets of the National Football League in a regular-season matchup.
Tottenham Hotspur built its stadium with a London NFL franchise in mind, as the city has become a hotbed of European fandom for American football. That was evidenced by the 60,000 people who turned out to watched Atlanta stave out the Jet’s late-game comeback and eke out a 27-20 victory.
“There were people from Berlin there, people from France, people from Holland — it was like a mecca of people all coming together to engage in that,” Mr. Staunton said, noting that the NFL, following in the footsteps of soccer, sees substantial opportunity in becoming a more global sport.
“Let’s face it — and I’m not trying to be controversial — calling something the World Series just means that you’re the champions of the United States and Toronto,” he said, making a crack at Major League Baseball.
Atlanta (the city) won in another way from the Falcons matchup: A sizable business delegation, encouraged by a temporary lull in the spread of the coronavirus, made it across the pond, using the game to spur on investment conversations. London in the last few months has welcomed offices of Atlanta tech unicorns with increasing regularity.
“I was there because there was a free ticket,” Mr. Staunton said jokingly. “But I’m also quite a good ’transmission vector’ to represent what the Southeast is to British businessmen and vice versa.”
The dynamism of the South is a story not well enough told in the United Kingdom, despite the presence of a significant cadre of British companies in the region, he said.
Mr. Staunton was impressed upon his arrival in the region “that the business community particularly was willing to invest in future competitors.”
“When British companies were looking to come to Atlanta or Nashville or Columbia, there was a real sense of corporate identity, that people wanted to help others come and grow the pie,” he said.
It was also easy enough to map onto the successes of places like Atlanta and Nashville complementary stories in U.K. cities like Manchester and Edinburgh, finding room for collaboration in scientific exchange, financial technology, cybersecurity and other sectors. Before coming to Atlanta from his previous posting in Greece, Mr. Staunton had time to traverse the U.K. to learn more about how to promote the strengths of regions outside London.
Much like the capital tends to soak up much of the attention in the U.K., the larger hubs in the United States tend to draw British firms’ eyes away from the Southeast U.S. — a mistake in Mr. Staunton’s view.
“If you add the GDP of the six Southeast states that I cover, people don’t appreciate that that’s the seventh largest GDP in the world, bigger than Italy’s. So that’s the scale of the opportunity that the Southeast represents, and obviously the United Kingdom (with some handling issues around Brexit) [is] looking to be much more present in the United States, looking for business opportunities but also developing cooperations with states.”
That last comment proved prescient (or at least the preparations were already under way). A few weeks after the Dec. 1 Consular Conversation, Mr. Staunton would arrange for a high-level visit from Minister of State for Trade Penny Mordaunt, who spoke of striking deals at the state level to build bottom-up support for a U.S.-U.K. trade deal.
Coming off the COP26 Glasgow summit in November, with the U.S. under President Biden renewing its commitments to combating climate change, a segment on everyone’s mind during Ms. Mordaunt’s visit was clean energy.
Mr. Staunton has welcomed the aggressive about-face from the Biden administration toward a focus on meeting climate goals, and the consul general has lobbied state legislatures in his six-state territory to adopt clean-energy targets and institutionalize their use of renewable fuels.
But seeing little momentum, he has also taken a pragmatic approach: focusing on the business benefits of the transition away from fossil fuels, and working to use the political heft of industry leaders as leverage to spur change.
“Everybody in this room knows the impact that the business community and industry has on the elected officials,” he said, noting successes like United Parcel Service Inc.’s commitment to buying 10,000 (British-made, of course) electric delivery vans and the renewable requirements of inbound investors like Facebook in Georgia.
A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Mr. Staunton exhibited a particular pride at the United Nations Climate Summit choosing his hometown for what he hopes will be seen as a historic moment.
“I wanted in 10, 20, 30 years’ time, people to look back and say, ‘Glasgow — that was the time when we really started to make a difference. That was the time when we really started to harness many of these announcements and actually put them into action,’” he said.
Similarly, if anything is to get done on the global issues of the day — from the defense of democracy to the shoring up the rules-based trading order — it will likely move happen thanks to collaboration between the United States and the United Kingdom, Mr. Staunton said.
That’s the idea underpinning the goal of striking a “new Atlantic Charter,” a nod to the pact the two powers signed 80 years ago amid the second World War. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Mr. Biden ahead of the G7 summit this year renewed their commitment to that ideal.
As Mr. Staunton wrote in an op-ed for Global Atlanta, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for partnership in new ways, and Atlanta has a key role to play as the home of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a “thriving ecosystem” for global health that has emerged around it, with Emory University, The Carter Center and other key institutions.
The British consulate has played a key role in connecting these groups with partners in the United Kingdom since the pandemic began.
“I basically ran a matchmaking service between experts in the United Kingdom with experts in Atlanta, trying to understand what we were doing about wastewater surveillance, what we were doing about vaccination, availability, inequities and hesitancy,” he said. “If you were saying to me, in which areas the British consulate in Atlanta are recognized in London as having value, I would say it’s been the last 18 months in this global public cooperation. And it’s such an advantage for the city of Atlanta in terms of the investment play, in terms of academic research, in terms of collaboration, but not many people know how strong you are in this area.”
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The hourlong discussion also included an overview of the Northern Ireland protocols, U.K.-U.S. security collaboration through AUKUS, Mr. Staunton’s views of China, where he was posted as a young diplomat, and much more.
A recording of the conversation is available for Consular Conversations annual pass holders. Learn more about the benefits of buying a pass here.
Join the next event with Japanese Consul General Kazuyuki Takeuchi on Jan. 20 here.
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