Silence of the Lambs

Labour's Trump Whisperers

I dreamt about Elon Musk last night. I can’t remember what he was doing, and I don’t really care to think about it too much. I suspect I’m not the only one to find this smirking ghoul lodged in my subconscious. In these dystopian times, millions of us go to bed with the latest outrage perpetrated by the Trump/Musk folie a deux still fresh in our minds, or we wake up bleary-eyed and brace ourselves for the next one.

It might be the puppy-killing Homeland Security director Kristi Noem posing dopily in front of a cage in El Salvador filled with caged men. Or the Mexican dad arrested by armed ICE agents outside the school where he had just dropped off his eighth grade son, who suffers from Asperger’s. Or the Turkish doctoral student arrested by ICE officers because she had co-authored an op ed supporting the Palestinians. Or the announcement by Laura Loomer of an app where ‘patriotic’ US citizens can get paid in cryptocurrency for denouncing ‘illegal aliens and foreigners engaged in criminal activity.’

Perhaps you noticed Trump’s casual suggestion that his administration would be seeking financial compensation for the rioters who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2020, who he pardoned. And last week, the venerable Smithsonian Institution - one of the pillars of the American scientific establishment - found itself in the crosshairs, when Trump issued an executive order accusing it of rewriting history, promoting social division and fostering a ‘sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made.’

Among other things, Mangolini objected to an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on ‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture’ which attempted to show how: ‘the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.’ According to Trump:

The exhibit further claims that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’ and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’

Wait, what? So race is not a ‘social construct’ or a ‘human invention’ now? Then what is it? Is it ‘science’ after all? Should we start measuring skulls again? Trump’s executive order doesn’t go into the nitty gritty, and it’s doubtful that he even understands the words that someone wrote for him. But the stench of white supremacism is all over this repellent executive order:

Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.

To advance this policy, we will restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness –- igniting the imagination of young minds, honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans.

Leaving aside the very unlikely possibility that Trump and his minions have ever visited a museum for any reason at all, this order is another indication that the apes have taken over the American zoo - if apes could wear jackboots. Or to put it another way, this is the kind of outcome you might except in a science fiction counterfactual in which the Confederacy won the Civil War.

Such daily episodes are now part of the nightmare that none of us can wake up from. Some may ignore it - for now. And who can blame them? Because this is grim, depressing, soul-sucking, real-life dystopianism that many people did not believe was previously possible.

Others may take consolation from Trump’s falling poll numbers or Tesla’s collapsing sales. Or laugh in slack-jawed astonishment at the staggering amateurism and incompetence of Signalgate, and the lies its participants used to cover their neanderthal footprints. Some may think that such an administration can’t possibly last.

If you are American, you might look around at Bernie Sanders and AOC’s huge rallies; at the angry town halls that are driving the likes of Lauren Boebert to restrict her interactions with her constituents to phone conversations - all of which goes against the crippling inertia of a Democratic leadership that cannot bring itself to think, let alone act, outside the box.

Canadians and Mexicans might take comfort from the forthright rejections of Trump’s aggressive bullying by Mark Carney or Claudia Sheinbaum. Last week, Carney declared unequivocally that ‘the old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,’ and insisted that regardless of any trade deals, there would be ‘no turning back.’

In the UK however, such consolations must be vicarious, because principled opposition and defiance are almost entirely non-existent in the ruling party, even though there is so much that Trump is doing that you would expect any self-respecting social democratic government to find fault with. Other leaders may call Trump out, but so far he has received almost nothing but praise and unctuous flattery from a Labour government that seems to believe it has discovered the magic formula that can tame the beast and bring him to its senses.

Starmer, Lammy, Kyle and others have fallen over themselves to avoid criticizing Trump or saying anything that might offend him. When Trump effectively abandoned Ukraine, and adopted a brazenly pro-Putin position that the British government opposes, Starmer somehow managed to praise the US president for having ‘created an opportunity for peace’. When Trump imposed tariffs on British steel and aluminium earlier this month, the government ruled out retaliation, and declared its intention to seek an exemption from the tariffs imposed on everyone else ie. the UK’s European allies.

Trump has even received the ‘unprecedented’ invitation from the king of a second state visit - handed to him by Starmer. Because that’s what you get when your billionaire pal attacks the British government, threatens to fund the far-right opposition, stokes race riots and calls one of your MPs an ‘evil witch.’

Over the last week, Labour have been desperately pleading with Trump not to impose tariffs on the UK. On Monday, Yvette Cooper expressed the government’s ‘disappointment’ that these efforts appear to have been in vain. In the same week that Rachel Reeves revealed benefit cuts that will put 250,00 of the poorest people in the country even deeper into poverty, UK negotiators were offering to remove the 2 percent tax levy on the online revenues of tech companies in the UK, in the hope that Mad King Don would give us a trade deal.

Reeves justified her cuts on the grounds that ‘the world has changed a lot since the Autumn Budget. People are watching that change happen before their eyes.’ Most people recognise that the main reason it has changed is because the UK’s once-trusted ally has turned into a lawless rogue state that has more in common with the state that the UK is indirectly fighting.

There are those who interpret Labour’s policy of appeasement as skilful realpolitik, or the bitter medicine that must be swallowed in the course of strategic diplomacy. This, apparently, is why our leaders have sent Peter Mandelson to Washington so that the Prince of Darkness can work his subtle magic.

Such guile is enough to put Cardinal Richelieu to shame - if Richelieu were a character in Yes, Minister. Because leaving aside the morality of abasing your country before a monstrosity like Trump, these charm offensives have brought the UK no tangible gains, not even from the narrowest conception of the ‘national interest’.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

What explains this unseemly eagerness to please a leader who clearly has no interest in pleasing us? One reason is Labour’s commitment to the ‘special relationship’, which is firmly embedded across the entire British political class. During World War II Harold Macmillan told Richard Crossman, then Director of Psychological Warfare at Allied Forces HQ:

We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run A.F.H.Q. as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.

Whether Macmillan actually said this or not, successive British governments have acted on this principle. During the Blair years, the UK fervently embraced the role of military junior partner, riding shotgun with the Bush posse and providing wise council - supposedly - to the neocon hotheads. ‘Get up the arse of the White House and stay there,’ Jonathan Powell told Blair’s ambassador Christopher Meyer in the lead up to the Iraq War.

Meyer did as he was told, and the rest is history, but not history that anyone in power on this side of the Atlantic wants to learn from. Both Conservative and Labour governments still tend to see the special relationship as some kind of sentimental attachment that allows Britain to follow in the slipstream of American military and financial power, and also to play a role on the ‘world stage’ that so many of our politicians believe is our national destiny.

Now, faced with an American leader who is closer to Caligula than Claudius, neither the Anglo-American relationship nor the ancestral British wisdom that supposedly sustained it are required, and it turns out that the junior partner is not a wise consigliere, but a supplicant. Starmer has tried to align himself with this new reality by avoiding any direct criticism of Trump, even when adopting a position that is objectively at odds with what the US is demanding.

This is clever, up to a point, but not as clever as admirers of Starmer’s diplomatic nuance seem to think. At times, Labour almost seems to be borrowing from the Trumpian playbook, in the hope that someone in America will be impressed by it. When DOGE decimates USAID, Starmer’s government slashes foreign aid to pay for rearmament. When ICE posts deportation-porn videos, the UK puts out its own videos of faceless men in chains. When Musk attacks the ‘wasteful’ federal government, attacks the ‘cottage industry of checkers and blockers’ in Whitehall who are ‘holding back Britain.’

As Starmer told his cabinet last month, the British government has to choose to be ‘the disruptors or the disrupted’ and cease ‘working away [while] the world is speeding up.’ Starmer’s team don’t appear to have read Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, and so many others who have carefully analysed Trumpian authoritarianism, and the damage that Trump and his movement are doing to American democracy. And if they have consulted these sources, they’re clearly not willing to act on anything they’ve read.

I’m not suggesting that Starmerism=Trumpism. But this is a right-wing Labour government that effectively won power by not being the Tories, and was fully prepared to use antisemitism to gaslight and destroy the left that Starmer himself was once aligned with - a position that has segued seamlessly into the government’s mostly uncritical support of Israeli barbarism in Gaza.

Contemptuous of the left, and even of liberalism, Starmer’s government has often acted as if rightwing voters were the only ones worth paying any attention to. On Monday, he wrote an op-ed for the Daily Mail, written in his usual insipid bloodless prose, in which he professed to share that the ‘anger’ that Mail voters felt regarding ‘illegal immigration’, and declared his government’s intention to ‘roll up its sleeves’ and protect ‘working people’ through more deportations and policing.

It is difficult not to conclude that Starmer’s refusal to stand up to Trump is also intended to court these voters. But this self-abasement is not only a reflection of Labour’s political weakness - it’s also a product of our national predicament. Even before Trump’s second coming, Brexit had damaged the UK economically and politically, and left it dangerously exposed to precisely the kind of international realignment that is now occurring.

Having succumbed to a fit of post-imperial hubris, the UK is discovering that going it alone means you really are alone, and a medium-sized power is now at the mercy of an erstwhile ally that regards even a nominally left-of-centre government as its natural enemy, and understands international relations only in terms of what it can get for itself.

Unable to acknowledge, let alone address, the recklessness of its decision to cut itself off from Europe, the UK has been trapped in a political whirlpool of its own making for the last nine years. Despite its attempts to place itself at the centre of European security concerns, Labour cannot or will not re-configure its relationship with the EU, for fear of opening itself up to a tabloid/Reform onslaught.

Until this changes, the growth agenda on which Labour has pinned its political aspirations is unlikely to prosper, and the UK will also remain vulnerable to Trump’s transactional bullying that can push the British economy underwater with a few well-aimed tariffs.

Weakness doesn’t have to mean powerlessness or the absence of principle. Canada and Mexico are no less vulnerable than we are, yet their leaders have laid down red lines and stuck to them. Carney’s defiance has made him and his party popular, and the same might occur to a British government that was prepared to stand up to Trump and make common cause with other countries that are doing the same.

Because Labour needs to become more popular than it is if it is going to survive, and there will come a fork in the road, when this timid, mediocre government will have to decide who - realistically - are the UK’s friends and allies in this new world of superpower predators. Many will argue, watching the horrors unfolding in the US, and Trump’s contemptuous treatment of Canada, Ukraine and other British allies, that we should have already reached that point.

And if Labour doesn’t reach it soon, and act accordingly, many more people will begin to ask, what is the point of it?