“Congratulations President-elect Donald Trump on your historic election,” British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer posted on X at 3:21am ET on Wednesday. The best that can be said about this tepid concession is that Starmer got his concession in before Kamala Harris. Make no mistake. This is not the result Labour wanted. Starmer’s Labour party was heavily invested in a Harris win and did everything it could to bring it about.
On July 4, Starmer won a landslide majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share of the popular vote (33.7 percent) for a winning party since 1919. Yet within a month, Sofia Patel, the Labour Party’s head of operations, was emailing Labour staffers to “help our friends across the pond elect their first female president”—Patel adding somewhat condescendingly, “Let’s show those Yanks how to win elections.”
More importantly than Labour foot soldiers pointlessly stomping around North Carolina for Harris, Starmer dispatched several of his top aides—including Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign strategist and now Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street director of communications—to brief the Harris team at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Little good did it do.
In September, they were followed by Deborah Mattinson, who had run focus groups for Tony Blair and served as Starmer’s director of strategy until Election Day. She would tell the Harris campaign “to put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side,” one of her colleagues told Politico. Both Starmer and Harris are former prosecutors. Like Starmer, Harris would be “relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars,” explained Jonathan Ashworth, director of the Labour Together think tank. That didn’t do much good, either.
Labour’s hatred of the new president-elect is personal and visceral. In June 2019, during the Conservative leadership election, Starmer posted: “An endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.” In 2017, Wes Streeting, now Starmer’s health secretary, tweeted: “Trump is such an odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your President,” an insult aimed not only at Trump but also at Americans.
The most sustained anti-Trump vitriol came from the Harvard Law School-educated foreign secretary, David Lammy. In 2017, Theresa May, the then prime minister, planned a state visit for President Trump. “Yes, if Trump comes to the UK I will be protesting on the streets,” Lammy tweeted. “He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser.” In an unhinged rant denouncing the visit, Lammy condemned Trump for his “shameful behavior on the international stage. We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say, ‘our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny, opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy he seems to stand for.’”
In an August interview with The Spectator (its new editor, Michael Gove, endorsed Harris as “the lesser of two evils”), Woody Johnson, Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St James in his first term, described Lammy’s description of Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” as “not a wise comment,” but then allowed, “those things happen in politics . . . there’s always a way to recover if you want.”
To his credit, Lammy has been doing his best to mend fences. In July, he told the BBC, “Donald Trump has the thickest of skins,” and observed that JD Vance, whom he’d met several times, had used some pretty choice language about Trump in the past. Of the new Vice President-elect, Lammy said they shared similar working-class backgrounds and addiction issues in their families. “We’ve written books on that, we’ve talked about that, and we’re both Christians. So I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.”
Harder to paper over than the history of personal insults is the yawning policy gap between the Labour government and the incoming Trump administration. To Labour, there is no issue more important than climate change. Ed Miliband, Labour’s climate change secretary, whom Charles Moore rightly describes as Labour’s spiritual leader, is a net-zero zealot. On the day Americans were voting for Trump and the return of American energy dominance, Miliband was giving the Cabinet a bleak picture of climate change. “Climate change is a threat to national security and growth, given [it] could force more than 200m people globally to migrate, the global economy could be 19% smaller in 2049 than it would be otherwise & it could put an additional 600,000 people in UK at risk of flooding,” Pippa Crerar, The Guardian’s political editor, reported him saying.
This puts Labour on a collision course with Trump and his pledge to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. With the Senate in Republican hands, Trump might well go a step further than what he did in his first term, and send the agreement—a treaty in all but name—to the Senate for its advice and consent, as required by the Constitution. Doing so would make it impossible for a future president to rejoin. It would lead to howls of outrage from the climate industrial complex and render their unachievable and unaffordable net zero programs pointless.
And it’s not only climate change. A week before the election, Labour unveiled a massive tax, spend, and borrow budget. In its first budget in 14 years, Labour raised taxes by £40bn ($51.6bn), borrowing by £28bn ($36.1bn), and public spending by £70bn ($90.3bn). The budget constitutes a doomed-to-fail bet that transferring around 2.5 percent of GDP from the wealth-generating private sector to the zero-productivity-growth public sector will, by some undefined form of alchemy, improve Britain’s poor economic performance.
It is here that President Trump’s second term could well have the biggest positive impact on Britain—by holding up Labour’s disastrous economic policies for comparison with Trump’s supply-side economics.
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation and author of The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.
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