From
The 51st State? Britain's Transatlantic Connections
by Neil Evans and David Sullivan, Planet 135:

Several speeches and publications in the last year or so have advocated that Britain draw closer to the United States. There is nothing new about this: there are always British politicians and journalists who talk up the special relationship between the two countries, but the debate over Europe has shifted the emphasis. Conrad Black, the Canadian businessman and proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, has urged that Britain should be offered membership of the North American Free Trade Asociation (NAFTA), as did Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House of Representatives. And Paul Johnson has argued in a typically robust article that not only should Britain become part of the US but that the newly enlarged state should be extended to embrace Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Such a new English-speaking superstate would mean that what continental Europeans did, or didn't do, would matter much less. Or not at all, one imagines the real hope to be.

...The desire to draw Britain closer to the United States is in part an attempt to redefine British identity. Nor should we be surprised that a Canadian and an Australian are intimately concerned in this question, because Canadian and Australian identities are also deeply enmeshed with British identity. The move towards a republic in Australia, for instance, is part of the larger question of Australia's emerging new identity as it struggles to define itself both in terms of its colonial heritage and its relationship with Asia, while the new British history was started by the New Zealander J.G.A. Pocock in an attempt to rescue the identity he saw challenged by British entry into the EEC....