EARLY in her prime ministership, during a row over the EEC budget, Margaret Thatcher overheard a European official say: “Britain is back”.
The remark pleased her as much as any she could remember.
Sir Keir Starmer echoed those words in his speech at London’s Guildhall on Monday.
But, coming from him, they sounded limp, even laughable.
In the early 1980s, Britain was back, because Thatcher was undoing the legacy of a Starmer-style government.
She was cutting taxes, spending and borrowing, and making Britain more competitive.
The PM is doing the opposite.
We are not seen today as “coming back”.
In Europe, we are treated as a rebel province, to be brought to heel.
Elsewhere, we are viewed as a police state, where violent criminals are released to make room for people who have said unpleasant things online.
One of the reasons the world sees us this way is because of the social media platform X/Twitter.
Starmer bizarrely picked a fight with X’s owner, Elon Musk, in the aftermath of the Southport riots.
But the more we learn about what was repressed in the aftermath of the fatal stabbings of three young girls, the more Musk looks vindicated.
Musk is now a key figure in the US administration, and the US is our strongest ally.
The Prime Minister emphasized the importance of collaboration between our two nations as the best hope for global welfare and as a means to advance our shared national interests.
The US is also by far our biggest trading partner — larger than our second, third and fourth biggest partners combined.
Relations with America, in short, are crucial to both our security and our prosperity.
But Labour has a problem.
As well as picking a fight with Musk, its leaders have called the thin-skinned Donald Trump every name under the sun over the years.
Various critics have described him as a racist, misogynistic individual who has openly admitted to inappropriate behavior. Ed Miliband called him a “racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper,” Wes Streeting labeled him as “an odious, sad, little man,” and David Lammy referred to him as a “neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath.”
‘SECURITY AND PROSPERITY’
Trump often lets his foreign policy be steered by whether other leaders have (in one of his stock phrases) “said nice things about me”.
When he looks at Starmer, he sees a human rights lawyer who restricts free speech, kneels for BLM and is behind in the opinion polls.
Not a great place to start.
But whatever his views about Starmer, Trump likes Britain.
He takes pride in his Scottish heritage, with his mother having immigrated from the Hebrides in 1930 and often enjoys sharing pictures of himself with the Royal Family with his guests.
Indeed, he is arguably more pro-British than Starmer is.
It is hard to imagine him handing away the Elgin Marbles, let alone the Chagos Islands.
Trump is letting it be known that Britain can exempt itself from the ten to 20 per cent tariff that he plans to impose on everyone else, not least the EU, who he describes as a “foe” on trade.
All we have to do is to enter into trade talks. We should be pursuing a trade deal with the Americans anyway.
They buy a quarter of everything we export.
Had it not been for the protectionism of the EU, which controlled our trade policy until Brexit, we would have signed a deal decades ago.
Trump started negotiating one with us in his first term, but Joe Biden — under pressure from Brussels and Dublin — iced it.
Will Labour be big enough to restart talks?
We already have a comprehensive zero-tariff deal with the EU.
What possible argument could there be against getting one with the US, too?
The trouble is that when Trump offered his deal the first time around, Labour wanted to rejoin the EU, and so opposed it on several fake grounds.
It pretended that Trump wanted to buy the NHS — even though he made clear that he would not want the NHS even if it were handed to him “on a silver platter”.
‘FRIENDS AND SPONSORS’
It claimed that Trump wanted to make us eat “chlorinated chicken”.
Setting aside the obvious point that no one can be forced to buy anything, there is more chlorine in a bag of washed British salad than on the carcass of an American chicken.
Starmer is under pressure to suffer in solidarity with the EU — despite the fact it shows us no love — rather than explain getting a deal with Trump past his MPs.
In his speech, the PM correctly said that both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee had seen Britain as an ally of both the US and Europe.
But neither man ever saw Britain as a member of any kind of European bloc.
Both thought we should look on from the outside as friends and sponsors.
Starmer is no Attlee, and certainly no Churchill.
But he does have the chance to secure the US trade deal that his predecessors have been after for half a century.
Let’s hope he puts country before party.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is the Conservative Party International Secretary.
