How Britain got Trumped Starmer’s economic model depends on MAGA

There must be moments when Keir Starmer and Donald Trump are together, and their eyes lock for a moment in mutually acknowledged bemusement: how could this be my Transatlantic counterpart, my co-custodian of the special relationship?

You could see it at Chequers, yesterday. Trump was all relaxed, bombastic id. “It’s quite a place, quite a place,” he repeated, basking in the glow of his unprecedented second state visit. He offered side-eye platitudes to Starmer, a symbol of the bygone world of grey-suited liberals and monotonous technocrats that he has set about destroying. For his part, the Prime Minister wore the nervous expression of a man keenly aware that disaster could strike at any moment. He clenched his jaw and adjusted his spectacles.

While the success of the trip will temporarily calm some nerves in No. 10, our open pandering to Washington evinces a nation cut adrift, its destiny in the unreliable hands of self-interested foreign powers. It’s almost a decade since the Brexit referendum, but taking back control in any meaningful sense remains an elusive dream, caught, as we are, between a stagnant old Europe and two new Cold Warriors facing off in the East and West. And so, we played our Trump card.

Starmer is the political personification of a social class that first assumed the MAGA movement to be a mere blip. Today, he prostrates himself before it. Well-educated, Remain-voting London professionals like him once sat around mid-century-modern dining tables and consoled themselves in a variety of ways. Hillary had won the popular vote, they insisted, and the Electoral College was a woeful anachronism. Besides, Russian bot farms had swung it in the end, enabled by a nefarious social media which poisoned the feeble minds of the lowly median voter, not in full possession of the facts. But it is an unfortunate and common misconception among progressives that those who disagree with them must have been bamboozled, or else they must have some illegitimate self-interest which has led them to maintain a position which is not simply a different interpretation or view of the world, but a fundamentally immoral one.

Trump’s ascendency, they decided, was Washington’s Brexit moment; cooler heads would soon prevail. Politics would revert back to the golden mean, to the default mode of urbane-progressive and liberal dominance in both economics and culture..

Such confidence feels almost quaint with hindsight, not least given how angry the people outside Westminster and Washington truly were. Stagnant real incomes haven’t shifted the mood, exacerbated with the condescending foreclosure of any discussion around a sustainable level of migration, or whether increasing the supply of cheap workers from countries with lower standards of living was really such a boon for general prosperity. Meanwhile, an ultra-progressive clique with an oversized influence on national discourse has radicalised itself on a diet of bite-sized continental philosophy for the social media age.

The result has been a conservative backlash, able to paint itself as an anti-elite crusade as so many institutions have been captured by a liberalism that has grown ever more extreme. Starmer, who once saw Trumpism as an aberration, is not only having to deal with the reality of its permanence on the international stage, but is also fighting a rearguard, defensive action against Nigel Farage at home.

Rather than receding, then, Trumpism and its myriad equivalents have advanced, brutally, in a harsher and deglobalising world. The centre has not held. The state has made a roaring re-emergence as an activist, sovereigntist defender of national interests. Protectionism is back. International bodies are flouted, or quietly ignored. Industrial strategies heap subsidies on strategic sectors and “de-risk” initiatives to re-shore production and domestic supply chains. Deportation is no longer a dirty word.

And if even progressives have had a tentative foray into this politics — in Britain, witness Shabana Mahmood’s belated rage at asylum laws and activist judges, or the last-ditch rescue of our native steel-making capacity — it is nevertheless the New Right which has responded most effectively to the West’s rising age of anger, ventriloquising the indignation of the public far more effectively than the morose Left: harder borders; tariff walls; a compelling narrative of national decline and rebirth; and an unashamedly integrationist, monocultural kind of patriotic supremacism.

Politicians in the Starmer mold seem almost out-of-kilter here — in office but not in power. They are the last gasp of an old order, hoping for a miraculous exit before the gates are stormed by the deplorables.

MAGA’s tour of Britain caps off a torrid two weeks for our flailing Prime Minister, his “phase two” for a government already in ruins. Indeed, recent events seemed tailor-made to ensnare the two leaders in a hostile media frenzy. Consider, for instance, the UK’s imminent recognition of a Palestinian state, vehemently opposed by a bellicose Israeli government and its enabler in Washington; or else Trump’s relationship with the world’s most notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which, if recently released documents are to be believed, was not dissimilar to the relationship that brought down Peter Mandelson last week.

Trump brushed any differences aside with a characteristic braggadocio befitting of his mantra: never apologise, never explain. Mandelson? “I don’t know him”. Wind power? “A very expensive joke”, but he wouldn’t cause a scene about it. In the event, the two leaders could amicably agree to disagree for the cameras, on everything from Gaza to a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy. So Downing Street’s tactic of treading on eggshells just about worked — but even in success, that profound nervousness only emphasises how supine and dependent Britain has become. With the seeds of Rachel Reeves’ investment-led growth failing to germinate, we await alms as an international mendicant, hoping for crumbs from the table of Silicon Valley, facilitated by The Donald.

Trump’s success, after all, has led all European leaders, perhaps Starmer more than most, to adopt this role of the pleading supplicant, even against all their queasy liberal instincts. The state visit was a victory for Britain’s enduring soft power, there’s no doubt. But with a stalled economy, a vanished industrial base, a weakened military and a government that places the whims of international jurisprudence above domestic political concerns, the hard power of the type exercised by the White House is a non-starter. All we have, in its place, are the baubles of royal patronage, now the nation’s most exuberant begging bowl.

And, to be sure, it has yielded impressive, not-insignificant results: £150 billion in investment, bestowed on us by Trump’s travelling circus of tech bros and financiers. But even here, amid the grateful headlines, Britain’s weakness is laid bare. For the most crucial special relationship today is not Trump’s with Britain, but rather the alliance between the presidency and the engines of American growth and innovation in big tech and high finance, so essential to that looming stand-off with China. Nvidia, the US chip-making giant, is worth more than all the companies on the entire FTSE100 combined.

Lacking national champions of our own, with few endogenous, dynamic companies to anchor their growth model, the Labour Party is left to seek survival in the only way Britain knows how: by prostrating itself before the hegemon, hawking its limited wares and assets to corporations headquartered thousands of miles away, leaving the country ever more dependent on the kindness of strangers.

This will do little to quell Britain’s own populist insurgency; not just Reform’s version, which is a comparatively moderate affair, but also the more radical, street-based activism of Tommy Robinson and his supporters. All the data centres in the world won’t assuage the fears of the thousands of protestors who marched through London last weekend to be addressed by Trump’s estranged acolyte Elon Musk. The blip has become the new normal. The aberration is now the establishment. The radical Right is internationally feeding off a sense of chaos, decline and disorder that traditional politicians cannot remedy. The Prime Minister will today comfort himself with broadsheet editorials that praise his adept diplomacy. But his mild reformism is no match for Britain’s domestic struggles, as the country’s search for ever-elusive “control” continues, and our own mini-Trumps provide the most popular answers.

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