It’s not going to be OK – you can’t appease Trump, and you shouldn’t want to try

The UK is on its own now

A David Low cartoon from 1940, after the Nazis took Paris and Britain was on its own

I could write this piece in any country in the West and the headline would be the same: It’s not going to be OK.

In the US, clearly, it’s not going to be OK.  In much of the country, if you are a woman or girl in need of an abortion, or a migrant fearing deportation to a concentration camp, or a CEO who does not want to grovel for government contracts, or a public servant who wants to serve without fear or favour, it’s not going to be OK.

In Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Poland, the Baltic States and all other countries that depend on US security guarantees, it won’t end well either. As for Ukrainians, they are about to find out the worthlessness of America’s promises.

These stories are being covered by reporters on the ground. I am in the UK, and as my government is desperately hoping that everything will be all right, I want to explain why all the cringe-inducing talk of a “special relationship” between the US and UK will come to nothing.

I am not about to lay into Labour ministers. They fear trade tariffs, which a UK outside the EU will not be able to cope with, and the collapse of the Atlantic alliance. If Trump abandons Ukraine and Nato, the security policy the UK has relied on since the wartime alliance between Roosevelt and Churchill will be dead.

You can see why the government is frightened. Not just politicians but diplomats, soldiers, the intelligence services and much of the media find it near impossible to imagine a new world without American support. States, like people, grow used to the comfort of the familiar, and panic when they see it vanishing.

No wonder Starmer’s administration hopes it can flatter Trump into making everything all right. No wonder Labour is turning to Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson and other Atlanticists from the Blair era in the hope they can perform miracles in Washington.

And so Keir Starmer tweeted his congratulations to Trump even before his victory had been confirmed. Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with its old ally, Starmer said, while leaving open the question of whether Trump’s America would want to stand shoulder to shoulder with us.

Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy, tried to become friends with J.D. Vance. Meanwhile, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, asked everyone to forget that he had once called Trump a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”.

The UK’s charm offensive won’t work because Lammy was basically right. I am not going to get into whether you can call today’s far right forces fascist or Nazi. Terminological bickering is a pointless pasttime. We can see with our own eyes what we face: a chaotic, corrupt, vindictive, mendacious and conspiratorial movement, led by a man who has been vicious all his life, and is now falling into gormless senility.

Like the Eye of Sauron, the global far right fixes on one country at a time and it is now trained on Labour Britain. It does not hate the Labour government for its real failures but for a caricature born of dark fantasies.

The UK is the only advanced economy with a strong left-wing government, and the far right has fitted it into the “great replacement conspiracy theory”. The theory holds that treacherous liberal elites (in this case Labour ministers) so hate the white race that they are flooding the West with Muslims, who will then vote for the elites and allow them to govern forever.

Two stories illustrate how deep the hatred runs.

We ought to remember a nearly forgotten incident in 2019, when Trump endorsed Katie Hopkins, a British right-winger so extreme the Daily Mail parted company with her.

She had condemned Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London for allegedly letting crime rip in the capital, and Trump joined her campaign with gusto.

Talk about punching down. The President of the United States of America himself was laying into a British municipal politician few Americans knew existed. Khan was the object of Trump’s venom because he is Muslim. It really was that simple.

Trump was fanning a hatred that is all over the far right and has led to the massacre of innocents. In 2019, for instance, as he prepared to kill 51 people in Christchurch mosques, Brenton Tarrant found the time to urge his supporters to show their commitment to a “white rebirth” by removing the “Pakistani Muslim invader [who] now sits as representative for the people of London”.

In the world of the far right, Khan’s mayoralty showed that London has fallen. And now Labour is in power nationally, its nightmare is complete. It sees the whole of the UK as under the control of the enemy.

And by the far right I don’t mean a beer-sodden thug dressed in a leather jacket and wall-to-wall tattoos but the president of the United States of America himself, and his vice president, and Elon Musk, his chief propagandist, who also happens to be the world’s richest man – and who, trust me, is about to get much richer.

Just before the election Vance said half-jokingly, in as much as he is capable of managing  a joke,  that the UK under Labour could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”

This year as rioters threatened to burn Muslims and asylum seekers alive after the murder of children in Southport Elon Musk drove the violence. He linked the riots to mass immigration, at one point posting that “civil war” in the U.K. was inevitable. He trolled Starmer for supposedly being biased against right-wing “protesters.” And, after Nigel Farage posted on X that, “Keir Starmer poses the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history,” Musk replied: “True.” 

They genuinely see murderous bullies as a courageous resistance against an occupying power.

Trump and Musk’s main British concern will be boosting Farage, Tommy Robinson and the hardmen on the streets, not tending to a mythical “special relationship”.

As for economic and security ties: Trump – who has promised to slap high tariffs on all imports into the US – has asked arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer to return as US trade representative. This is just the start. Unlike the mainstream figures who staffed Trump’s first administration, the second will be staffed by true believers: eyes bright with fervour; minds filled with malice.

The UK should stop crawling to them and start trying to rebuild our shattered alliance with the EU. Kissing Trump’s ring is worse than demeaning, it is pointless.

All the smiles of our politicians and charms of our diplomats will be in vain. Nothing we do can make it OK. 

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