BRITAIN’S elite stands exposed by Donald Trump’s tariffs. The Make America Great Again (Maga) presidency is declaring economic war on its so-called allies: and none, worldwide, have staked so much for so long on “partnership” with the United States as Britain.
What Trump terms “liberation day” is a watershed globally, signalling a decisive rejection of the era of globalisation by the world’s most powerful country.
It should be a turning point in Britain, too. It is an opportunity to confront the cross-party consensus in favour of the US alliance, as well as the laissez-faire approach to domestic industry. And to confront too the ascendant far right, whose claims to patriotism are compromised by their ties to the US.
The choices facing Keir Starmer are unpalatable.
He has bent over backwards to appease Trump, flattering him with the offer of an unprecedented second state visit and ducking questions on the US leader’s many outrages, from proposals to ethnically cleanse Gaza to threats to annex Canada.
It was already evident, from Trump’s indifference to Starmer’s pleas for a US “backstop” in Ukraine, that the flattery secures no concessions. But direct attacks on British exports are a humiliation: does he retaliate, and risk a widening rift with the White House? Or stand accused of failing to fight his country’s corner?
The Conservatives are just as committed to the transatlantic alliance. Their advice is to get around tariffs through a free trade agreement.
Labour is keen. But it faces problems. Starmer has also pledged to reset the relationship with the EU, but alignment with Brussels on food standards or environmental and digital taxes runs directly against US demands.
For the left, there are bigger problems with a free trade deal. Project 2025, Trump’s team’s blueprint for power, promotes a template drawn up in his first presidency, opening British public services including the NHS to foreign competition. US Big Pharma has lobbied for years for reform of “drug pricing and government reimbursement for pharmaceuticals.” The argument is that British regulation keeps medicine prices artificially low, disadvantaging US companies. Their solution would drive the price of medicine, and the cost of the NHS, up.
So we should mobilise against any free trade deal with Trump, even if pitched as a means to avoid punitive tariffs.
Though Labour and the Tories take the US alliance as an article of faith, their combined vote share at the last election was the lowest since 1945. A campaign for a completely different approach to foreign relations could gain traction, especially in the context of perceived US bullying.
Pressure on MPs should involve demands for state intervention to protect vital industries, including through nationalisation.
The slogan “take back control” could be redeployed to address our powerlessness before the whims of transnational companies and foreign powers, through a massive extension of public ownership.
Rejecting an unfair trade deal with the US can accompany pressure for fairer trade with the global South, perhaps even the “progressive trade and investment policy that puts working people at its heart” envisaged, in a more optimistic moment, by Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and then Corbyn shadow cabinet member Barry Gardiner as the fruit of potential left victories in both countries.
Such a campaign could see the left regain the initiative from the right. Reform UK imitates the Maga phenomenon; Nigel Farage advertises his closeness to Trump. These can be turned into disadvantages as the trade war takes hold, demonstrations that the right does not have the interests of working people at heart.
Stand up to Trump. The slogan has the potential to wrongfoot both the Establishment and the insurgent right, and open opportunities for a left resurgence.
But it must be deployed as part of a specifically socialist demand for an overhaul of Britain’s economic and foreign policy in the working-class interest, rather than as a swan song for discredited liberalism.
