Regime Change in Washington Leaves London’s Ancien Regime Scrambling
COURAGE MEDIA
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer headed to Washington a fortnight ago for his first official talks with re-elected President Donald Trump. For now, at least, their meeting has been interpreted as a PR victory in Downing Street: Starmer successfully charmed his mercurial host with lavish praise, a promise of increased defense spending, and an unprecedented invitation from King Charles III to come back for a second U.K. state visit. He even sounded like Trump when brandishing the invitation: “This has never happened before. It’s so incredible. It will be historic.”
Trump for his part seemed exceedingly pleased, offered plenty of smiles, and variously praised Starmer’s “beautiful accent”, his “beautiful, great” wife, and the prospect of a “very good” trade deal. So far, so good. But despite the bonhomie between the host and his guest, the meeting left many crucial questions unanswered: about Ukraine, NATO, the future of the Chagos Islands, trade, tariffs, and the limits of American patience with British infringements on free speech, in particular. On the most immediately pressing issue, the President was unmoved by Starmer’s appeal for a stronger U.S. commitment to “backstop”’ the security of Ukraine, beyond having U.S. workers there as part of a minerals deal. More broadly, the friendly mood music couldn’t obscure the fact that the two leaders are ideologically poles apart both domestically and in their views of the international order, in stark contrast to the relative harmony of past golden eras of the “special relationship”, like the Thatcher-Reagan crusade against socialism, and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s “third way” effort to redefine the world in the era of globalization. Despite the successful choreography of their “first date”, the Anglo-American relationship is resultantly likely to be on a tightrope over the next four years.
One should not exaggerate. The Brits will remain America’s most reliable partner of choice, and are seen as such by the American public, 43% of whom in a recent poll named the UK as America’s closest ally (no other European country broke 10%); the UK for its part will continue to depend primarily on the United States for its security. The special intelligence and nuclear relationships between the two countries, embedded in the Five Eyes agreement and the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement respectively, will likely continue even if the US scales back its commitment to NATO. They will continue to enjoy the world’s single most lucrative bilateral investment relationship, as well as the cultural bonds of a shared language and heritage – the “fraternal relationship of English- speaking peoples”, as Churchill put it, which will be brought to the fore by the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on May 8th, and the 250th anniversary of America’s independence from Britain in July 2026. Nor will it hurt that Donald Trump is the first president since Woodrow Wilson to have a British mother and has a well-known affinity for her birthplace, Scotland, where he owns a gold course. Vice-President JD Vance for his part takes pride in his Scots-Irish ancestry, while “First Buddy” Elon Musk has referenced a touching sympathy for the country from which most of his ancestors also came.
Nonetheless, Trump’s personal investment in the special relationship will be limited at best. As a transactionalist par excellence – and one who seems fairly indifferent to the idea of alliances in general – he will no doubt mostly measure Britain against pragmatic criteria: is it useful to him, and to his broader agenda? A number of things have happened over the past decade that have made it less so: one ironically being Brexit, which meant that Washington no longer had a reliable pro-American partner working within the European Union; another being a reduction in the overall footprint of the British armed forces even as their budget grew from 2% to 2.3% of GDP. The impression of weakness is likely to be compounded by Starmer’s terrible domestic opinion poll ratings and Britain’s anemic economic growth forecasts.
But perhaps the biggest problem for the Prime Minister is that Trump sees him – and the recently ousted Tories too, for that matter – as being on the wrong side of the great divide between nationalists and globalists, populists and elites, wokes and anti-wokes. Their governments are as such likely to disagree not just about the role of global institutions, trade with China, and the terms on which the Ukraine war should end, but also over matters of fundamental principle around borders, identity, censorship, and discrimination. And at the very foundation of the relationship, radical demographic change in both countries is corroding the ties of shared heritage and culture which have made it natural for centuries for Americans to look across the Atlantic to Europe in general, and to the British Isles in particular, as their home away from home: as Dame Karen Pierce, British Ambassador to Washington from 2020-25, put it recently before a House of Lords committee, “the demographic in both our countries is changing… I don’t think you’ll any longer find people with an automatic connection to Europe and the UK in the same way that you would have done say 25 years ago”. Nonetheless, for the time being the countries are still too tightly interwoven to risk total rupture, even though the policies and ideologies of their respective governments will be deeply and mutually politically and morally unpalatable in the years ahead. The upshot, almost certainly, will be diplomatic turbulence in a number of key areas. This extended article takes a look at half a dozen of the likeliest flashpoints.
Party Politics
Spats between Trump and Labour are long-standing and personal, even if Keir Starmer has been working hard of late to smooth things over.
During his first term, leading lights in the party went out of their way to express their loathing of the President. During the Conservative leadership election in 2019, Starmer tweeted that “[a]n endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister”. Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, feuded extensively with him, declaring in an interview that “[h]e’s a racist. He’s a sexist. He’s a homophobe”. The most sustained anti-Trump invective came from the man who is now Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, who denounced Trump as a “tyrant in a toupee”, “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser”, and in a tirade denouncing his first state visit, condemned him for his “shameful behavior on the international stage. We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say, ‘our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny, opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy he seems to stand for.’”
Woody Johnson, Trump’s ambassador to Britain in his first term, described Lammy’s outburst as “not a wise comment”, but granted “there’s always a way to recover if you want”. Instead, Starmer appears to have had a briefing saying Harris would win last year’s presidential election and added to the bad blood during the campaign. A LinkedIn post from a Labour staffer inviting volunteers to go over to campaign for Harris became the center of a firestorm, with Elon Musk criticizing it on X and encouraging the ire of prominent Republicans. Trump’s campaign even filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against the Labour Party, accusing it of “blatant foreign interference” and arguing the request for volunteers created a “reasonable inference that the Labour Party has made … illegal foreign national contributions”.
Worse than Labour staffers pointlessly knocking on doors for Harris in the swing states was Starmer’s decision to dispatch several of his top aides – including Matthew Doyle, now Downing Street director of communications, and Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign strategist and now the PM’s chief of staff – to brief the Harris team at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not that it did her much good. In September, they were followed by Deborah Mattinson, a pollster for New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who served as Starmer’s director of strategy until election day. She reportedly told the Harris campaign “to put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side” and urged “relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars”. That didn’t help her much either, but it added to the impression of partisan interference by Labour against the Republican campaign.
Since Trump’s victory, the Labour top team have been making efforts to repair the damage, with Lammy telling the BBC that he’d warmed to the president-elect in a face-to-face meeting last year, finding him a “good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the U.K”. They duly pulled out all the stops to get Starmer invited to the White House for their recent meeting, and were relieved at how it went. But nobody was fooled that President and Prime Minister were on the same page.
Indeed, ideologically, the distance between the two on most issues looks almost unbridgeable. Trump, as we know, favored Brexit: the Labour Party in the majority voted Remain. Labour under human rights lawyer Sir Keir is internationalist and legalist to the point of unilateral multilateralism (following the rule book even if few others do), whereas Trump believes in putting America first and the world and international law second. Like the Democrats, Labour favors more government, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves going out of her way to embrace Bidenomics under the last administration; Trump obviously favors less. In Opposition, now Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband stated that he aspired to “match the ambition of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act” and that he was drawing on advice from the architects of the American plan; Trump by contrast has quit the Paris Climate Agreement and wants to gut the IRA. Labour is unwilling to deport most illegal immigrants on human rights grounds; the Trump Administration is using the military to secure the border and has strong-armed foreign countries into taking their illegals back. And whereas the Trump administration is moving to aggressively dismantle the discriminatory DEI industry in America, Labour is entrenching it further; it recently threatened to punish universities if they fail to champion “diversity” under a funding plan that will predictably intensify racial discrimination against white British applicants, and plans a Race Equality Act that will bring US-style disparate impact dogma to Britain just as America under Trump is moving away from it.
Nor are things obviously better on the Tory side, where the long hangover of the disastrous Conservative era means there is very little appetite to help out the un-conservative Conservative Party. In office from 2010-24, the Tories quadrupled net immigration, imposed the highest tax and debt burden since World War 2, created more public sector DEI posts than any other country on a per capita basis, and inflicted the highest energy costs in the Western world. Trump’s advisers seem to have genuine contempt and anger for what this did to Britain, especially regarding mass immigration and multiculturalism, and for the future they’ve set up the country. As one fairly representative source told The Spectator, “There’s obviously a special relationship and we would love to keep that, but if the UK turns into Pakistan then that’s less interesting”. The party now has a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, but her credibility in MAGA world is limited by her own involvement in the last government. She is also on record declaring herself “not a Trump fan” and seemed to sneer that Trump was “interesting company” in Parliament last year, while her longtime mentor and current Spectator editor Michael Gove publicly endorsed Kamala Harris as a “lesser evil”. One Trump team source told The Independent: “Trump has zero interest in meeting her [Ms Badenoch].”
This estrangement of the erstwhile sister parties will probably not work to Starmer’s advantage, however. If anything, it has allowed Nigel Farage to position his Reform UK party, with some success, as the “real” opposition in Britain, and Elon Musk’s growing interest in Reform represents an opportunity for Farage to further his standing. Although Musk has expressed doubts about whether Farage can carry off victory by himself, he has important allies and cheerleaders, not least the 47th president of the United States himself as well as influential MAGA operatives like former Farage aide Raheem Kassam and Steve Bannon.
There have been musings among such figures about “regime change” in the UK and how to get a Trump-style prime minister into Downing Street, perhaps even by “crashing the British economy” in order to cause a crisis which would force the government out. Such fanciful discussions seem to lack an understanding of the British parliamentary system and the fact that Starmer has a huge majority for the next five years. Still, Trump Worlders particularly interested in the future of the UK are looking at how to encourage Reform and the Tories to get together, in the belief that would be a winning ticket and put Britain on a better trajectory. Judging by polls that currently show Reform in first place or narrowly second behind Labour, with the Tories trailing in third, this is a strategically plausible approach. If realized it would mean a combined right-wing vote share in the UK of almost 50%, which if brought together under the leadership of Reform (or perhaps a new, more Reform-friendly Tory leader like Robert Jenrick) would reset British politics in a MAGA-friendly direction. It is bound, however, to create tensions with Britain’s establishment parties in the meantime.
This article (TURBULENCE, NOT RUPTURE: THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP UNDER TRUMP 2.0 (PART I)) was created and published by Courage Media and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ayaan Hirsi Ali
See Related Article Below
The Special Relationship Under Trump 2.0 (Part II)
How The Conflict Over Free Speech Threatens the Special Relationship
Of all the likely political tensions between London and Washington over the next four years, free speech is in a category of its own. To the new American administration, this is a fundamental principle as well as a national security interest. As Vice President Vance told shocked European delegates to the Munich Security Conference in February, Washington’s top concern is “the threat from within” the Nato alliance posed by European governments’ escalating assaults on “democratic values”, in particular their efforts to censor speech, quarantine popular opposition parties, and annul elections.
This was aimed in part at the Brits. The birthplace of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights is regarded by Trump’s team as having fallen far from its lofty heritage; these days, its reputation among right-wing Americans is more that of a woke “anarcho-tyranny” where violent criminals are released from prison and illegal immigrants are put up in hotels while law-abiding citizens are locked up for speech and thought crimes. JD Vance accosted the British government in his Munich speech along these lines, highlighting the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old veteran who was convicted two years ago for silently praying for his aborted son within a 150-meter buffer zone around an abortion clinic.
Pro-life expression is far from unique in being targeted by the censors. Vague speech offences have proliferated in Britain in recent years, even as speech authorities like the Office of Communications (Ofcom) have become more powerful. Since 2003, the Communications Act has prohibited undefined “malicious communications” and made it a criminal offense to “persistently make use of a public electronic communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety” – all highly subjective offences. Other prohibited communications include incitement, causing “non-trivial psychological distress” and “stirring up” racial or religious hatred. In practice these broad offences have resulted in thousands of prison sentences for social media posts and memes, personal insults, public signs, and, as Vance noted, even prayers. During the ten years before Starmer took office, over 96,000 cases were brought and 72,000 convictions obtained for racially or religious aggravated speech alone, as you can see below.
This is outrageous enough from an American conservative perspective. But Vance’s emphasis on protecting expressive liberty in his Munich speech was not just rooted in moral commitment. It was also an implicit warning to the Brits and other European governments to retreat from the proxy war on democratic populism via speech policing that they have been engaged in ever since 2016. As the Vice President put it to Keir Starmer in the Oval Office on February 27th, “there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British … but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens”. Starmer struck a conciliatory note, denying any intention “to reach across U.S. citizens” with speech-related prosecutions, but his hosts have good reason to doubt these assurances given developments across Europe in recent years.
After Donald Trump’s first election victory and the Brexit referendum result, a panicked transatlantic establishment reacted by ramping up efforts to suppress disfavored speech and restrict the flow of online information. The underlying assumption was that their own increasingly extreme policy consensus could only be rejected by voters who were stupid or manipulated by “hate speech”, “misinformation”, and “disinformation” – terms which skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of these upsets. So long as these were suppressed, the thinking went, people would stop voting the wrong way.
In the US itself, the First Amendment represented a formidable obstacle to this censorship project: as John Kerry complained before an audience at the World Economic Forum last year, “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”. A partial workaround during the Biden years was for the federal government to just ignore it by pressuring American tech companies to censor online speech for them, as revealed by the Twitter Files and confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg. Hilary Clinton put it to them bluntly: if social media companies “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control”.
But given the global interconnectedness of the internet, a subtler solution was found by outsourcing anti-populist speech policing to foreign countries without First-Amendment-type protections. The European Union took a lead on this, leveraging its huge market size and the regulatory “Brussels Effect” to try to force global internet content moderation in the desired direction. This culminated in 2023 with the coming into force of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which seeks to suppress the “spread of disinformation” and does so by threatening to fine any internet platform up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “harmful” or “false” content within a matter of hours. What constitutes “harmful” or “false” expression is, of course, determined by small groups of Platonic guardians chosen by the European Commission.
The UK followed suit with its own Online Safety Act in 2023, which created vague offences for online speech such as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological harm”. It also saw the growth of NGOs devoted to anti-populist censorship across borders. The Global Disinformation Index and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), for example, both sprang up to focus on cutting off revenue to perceived right-wing sites by coordinating advertiser boycotts with politicized charges of “disinformation”. The CCDH – which was founded by Morgan McSweeney, now Chief of Staff at Downing Street – also lobbied US legislative staff to adopt STAR, a proposed “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media”, which it seemed convinced could provide the US with de facto hate speech restrictions by the back door.
This all came to the attention of the Trump team when British authorities and NGOs trained their fire on one specific American citizen and tech company owner: DOGE chief and X/Twitter proprietor Elon Musk. The Center for Countering Digital Hate managed to scare off many advertisers from Twitter after his acquisition of the platform, with leaked documents subsequently confirming that the NGO had “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top priority. The authorities also took aim at him after riots broke out last August following the murder of three white British girls by the son of Rwandan immigrants. Sir Mark Rowley, London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, threatened to “come after” people in other countries for speech proscribed in British law, specifically mentioning “the likes of Elon Musk”, who, he alleged, was “whipping up hatred”. Labour MPs piled on by demanding measures against X, and Sir Keir Starmer himself weighed in to menace its owner by announcing that “large social media companies and those who run them” were responsible for “harmful disinformation”. “That is also a crime”, said the Prime Minister. “It is happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.” And in theory, it could be: the 2023 National Security Act created a foreign interference offence which was extended by the Online Safety Act, and a company that falls foul of it could be fined 10% of its global revenue.
But picking a fight with the First Buddy over this issue, when he has both an adamantine commitment to free speech and a direct line to President Trump, could easily become a major source of tension between the two capitals. The US Department of Justice is already examining whether the CCDH – essentially a Labour Party cut-out – has engaged in a foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign government. And were Sir Keir Starmer to give in to pressure from his own party by pursuing a Brazil-style ban on X, it could provoke full-fledged political and economic retaliation from Washington. Despite an otherwise inauspicious start for his government on the issue – they dropped a Tory bill to strengthen free speech in higher education, and recently demanded a backdoor into Apple users’ encrypted data – there are signs that Starmer is aware of this: the Telegraph has reported that the PM may be prepared to alter the Online Safety Act in order to avoid American tariffs. Although it will go against the grain of his own instincts, this suggests he grasps that “there is a new sheriff in town”, as Vance warned in Munich, and one who will not tolerate a continuation of the cyber proxy war on the speech rights of American citizens.
This article (TURBULENCE, NOT RUPTURE: THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP UNDER TRUMP 2.0 (PART 2)) was created and published by Courage Media and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Featured image: youtube.com
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