The British right betrays its country as it kisses Trump’s ring

Conservatives become the new communists

Nov 15, 2024

In a pattern familiar to students of Western communism, the British radical right loves the leaders of a hostile foreign power more than they love their country

Power doesn’t only corrupt: it sweetens and sanitises. Like perfume in a morgue, it blocks out the stench.

People, who only a few days ago could see the truth about Donald Trump, are rushing to grovel before him now that he has power. They want his favour or to bask in his reflected glory.

Governments hope that by flattering Trump they can stop him from throwing their world into chaos.

So Keir Starmer politely welcomed Trump’s victory. At her Mansion House speech last night about the future of the economy, Rachel Reeves spoke as if our trade with the US could flourish now that Trump was in charge.

The United States is “our single most important destination for financial services trade,” she said. “I look forward to working closely with President-elect Trump, and his team, to strengthen our relationship in the years ahead.”

What else can Starmer and Reeves do except hope that Trump turns out to be a transactional politician rather than an unhinged narcissist?

Perhaps if Europe spends more on helping the people of Ukraine and on defence, then maybe Trump will not introduce tariffs and wreck Nato.

For their hopes to make sense, they must ignore everything they know about Trump from his attempt to overthrow a legitimate election in 2021 to his behaviour in the presidential campaign to the claque of nutjobs and tyrannophiles he now wishes to bring with him to Washington.

The position of the British right is even more exposed. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, two former prime ministers of the UK, no less, supported Trump, as did Nigel Farage, a poodle in human form who yaps to his master’s commands.

They, along with a large number of British and European conservatives, are following the same miserable trajectory as their American counterparts. They relinquish any claim they once had to intellectual standards and basic patriotism as they abase themselves before the new power in the world.

The smell from their perfume is overwhelming.

Here is the Daily Telegraph, once a bastion of British rather than American conservatism. “Vivek Ramaswamy wants to shut the FBI with Elon Musk,” begins one approving story, as the paper egged on Trump’s most extreme flunkeys. After agreeing that law enforcement should be abolished, if that is what the Emperor Trump requires, the Telegraph went on to say that “Britain must follow Trump and embrace mass deportation”, and to attack leftwing lawyers who may dare to “thwart Trump’s deportation plans” with their woke concerns for human rights.

On and on the admiration for the authoritarian leader of a foreign power goes. And not one of them stops to think that Trump gives every indication of becoming the leader of a hostile foreign power.

The right-wing dominance of our media stops most journalists from stating the obvious. Trump is an America First nationalist who defends what he imagines to be the interests of America. Farage, Johnson, Truss and the Telegraph right once claimed to be British patriots. Now they are cheerleaders for right-wing America.

If the left had its wits about it, a big “if” I grant you, it would see the chance to attack. Most British people dislike Trump, whatever their politics. In polls 7 n 10 people say they disapprove. Of course they do, why should any patriotic citizen of any other country support an American nationalist?

The British right, or large elements of it, are becoming like the 20^th century left it once opposed. George Orwell wrote in the 1940s of how British communists and their fellow travellers had transferred their nationalism from their own country to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

“Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism – using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but ‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs.”

In the 1980s, I along with hundreds of thousands of others marched with the Campaign Nuclear for Disarmament (CND). We weren’t supporters of the Soviet Union, or most of us weren’t.

We sincerely wanted to avert the risk of nuclear war in Europe. But CND’s policy was that the UK should unilaterally disarm without demanding anything from the Soviet Union in return. Objectively, we were a pro-Moscow movement that furthered the aims of Soviet foreign policy. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party of the 1980s were able to use the charge of aiding an enemy to destroy the left of the day.

Now the roles are reversed. What will the right do if and when Trump imposes trade tariffs on UK goods, or endangers European security, or betrays Ukraine? I would not count on it defending the rest of us.

You don’t need to go through Trump’s vindictive, mendacious career to see a bleak future. Just a few weeks ago the people who now attempt to sanitise and deodorise Trump knew perfectly well that he was out of his mind <iframe width="560" height="315" src="

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At one point during the presidential campaign, he stood on stage with the grin of second childhood on his face, gormlessly singling along to “YMCA,” oblivious to its status as a gay anthem. At another event he rambled at length about the, well, length of Arnold Palmer’s dick.

Maybe dementia is setting in – he is 78, after all. Perhaps his enemies’ failed attempts to stop him running by prosecuting him have stoked his already howling paranoia.

(And, incidentally, if there is a better illustration of the truth of “You come for the king, you better not miss” than the delayed and desultory attempts to hold Trump accountable for 6 January, I cannot find it. Instead of putting him in prison where he belongs, they succeeded only in enraging Trump and his supporters. To switch to Shakespeare “the attempt but not the deed” confounded the Democrats.)

Whatever the cause, you only have to look at his nominations to see the future

He wants an evolutionary dead end of the Kennedy clan as his health secretary, where he will have the power to kill countless thousands with his anti-vaxxer quackery.

A dark and dangerous figure called Matt Gaetz will be the instrument of his vengeance as Attorney General, if Trump gets his way

And as if to scoff at all those in the Labour government who hope they can deal with him, and all those on the right who think they can transfer their patriotism from the US to the UK, Trump wants to bring in Tulsi Gabbard, an open admirer of Putin and Assad to serve as director of national intelligence, and a gormless ingenu to be his defence secretary.

Not much hope of the “special relationship,” Ukraine and the European alliance surviving the arrival of this crew.

Labour can cope with the loss of the US military support. It will be hard to bear but Labour never wanted Trump in the first place.

As for the transferred nationalists on the British right their future looks grim. Like the communists of the 20^th century, they will pay a price for selling out their country for a malign authoritarian fantasy.

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Writing from London

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