The UK puts more store on its relationship with the US than any other European country. The “transatlantic alliance” is the keystone of its defense and security strategy. The City of London and Wall Street are intertwined. Academics and students shuttle between US and British universities. A Briton edits the US’s leading business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. Board a plane from London to New York and you discover that Winston Churchill’s union of the English-speaking peoples is still alive.
So the British establishment is reeling at the news that US president-elect Donald Trump is back in the White House, with a Republican-dominated Senate and a majority in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. UK Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer was quick to phone the disruptor-in-chief with his congratulations, but there is no doubt that he would have preferred a Kamala Harris victory.
This is not just because Labour and the Democrats are sister parties, sharing ideas and personnel. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves modeled her economic strategy (“securonomics”) on Joe Biden’s original, and Labour Party activists decamped to the US to campaign for Harris. It is also because Trump stands for everything that the Labour Party loathes — deporting undocumented immigrants, machismo, and, in their view, racism. In his days as a backbench MP, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, denounced Trump as “a KKK” and a “Nazi” and pledged that, if he comes to the UK, “I will be out there protesting.”
A normal president might put all of this down to the rough-and-tumble of political life. However, Trump is not a forgive-and-forget type of guy, and he combines a thin skin with a shrewd ability to use “offense” to unbalance his opponents. Trump launched legal action against Labour activists for interfering in the US election (the activists had made the mistake of coordinating with Labour Party officials).
The wider British political sphere is also nonplussed by the Trump victory. Lord William Hague, a former leader of the Conservative Party and current candidate for the chancellorship of Oxford University, wrote in The Times on Tuesday that Trump was “a serious danger” and “the approach of midnight.” “Whatever our past affiliations,” he concluded, “we should all be Democrats.”
The only people who have a close relationship with Trump are on the periphery of British politics: Nigel Farage, of course, the leader of Reform, who celebrated Trump’s victory at Mar-a-Lago; former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; and a handful of members of the UK Parliament such as the former home secretary Suella Braverman. However, these few are of no use to the UK government. Can we really expect Starmer to use Farage as a Trump whisper (or British ambassador to Washington, as Farage would dearly like)? The British establishment would have fewer friends in Washington, DC, when Trump takes office in January than it has had since the Second World War.
It is impossible to say whether Trump would deliver on his promises to strike a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine or withdraw from NATO. A dealmaker rather than an ideologue, Trump is nothing if not inconsistent. If Trump withdraws the US’s support for Ukraine, it would frustrate the main object of the UK’s foreign policy for the past few years, which has been to resist aggression in the East. If he withdraws from NATO, it would frustrate one of the main objects of British foreign policy since 1949, when the organization was formed.
However, even if these drastic results are avoided, the UKs special transatlantic relationship would cool. There would be none of the common sympathy that characterized the Biden years (and would have characterized the Harris years). Instead, Trump’s team might well treat British officials as spiritual extensions of the Democratic Party, as Hague implied. Trump would expect the British, like the rest of the Europeans, to spend more on defense, and quickly. He would also shift much of his attention away from “processes” to deal-making, and away from Europe to the rest of the world.
Trump’s unpredictability also makes it impossible to know if he would impose tariffs on the UK and the rest of Europe and if so, how high they would be. Still, tariffs or not, he would pursue an expansionist economic policy of reducing personal and corporate taxes, rolling back the regulatory state, and running the economy hot. This would almost certainly attract a great deal of talent and capital from the UK, particularly as the Labour Party is raising taxes and squeezing the rich. Why stay in Starmer’s socialist-leaning London when you can enjoy a warm welcome in Trump’s New York?
The UK has often been lucky in its timing when it comes to the special relationship. The Thatcherite Conservatives forged close bonds with the Reagan Republicans in the 1980s, and the Middle-Way Blairites forged equally close bonds with the Clintonites in the 1990s. For a while it looked as if this trick would be repeated when the UK’s vote for Brexit was followed by the US’s vote for Trump in 2016. Trump marched hand-in-hand with “Britain’s Trump,” Boris Johnson, and promised a “beautiful trade deal” to solidify the Brexit revolution and confound the EU. However, it was not to be: Johnson lacked administrative skill, Covid functioned as a massive distraction and Trump lost the 2020 election.
This time round, the timing could hardly be worse for the UK. Trump has no chemistry with Starmer, a human rights lawyer turned public prosecutor. The Labour Party has no interest in a Brexit-flavored transatlantic trade deal. The UK is now more isolated than it has been since the glorious isolation of the Victorian era: Downgraded in Europe because it has left the EU, and no warm ties with MAGA America.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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