Now Britain must embrace Trumpism
A muscular ‘America First’-style economic growth strategy – one brimming with optimism, and with an appetite for risk and deregulation – could be just what Keir Starmer needs to fire up his flagging administration, says Emily Sheffield
Today, Donald Trump will achieve the extraordinary. He will be sworn in – against expectations – for a second presidential term, having yesterday promised 25,000 supporters he would make America great again: “At noon, the curtain closes on four long years of American decline, and we begin a brand new day of American strength and prosperity, dignity and pride.”
He also promised that “every radical and foolish executive order” of Joe Biden’s will be repealed; 200 are expected on his first day in office.
This time, unlike 2017, Trump is not the surprise outsider; he is a leader in full control of his Republican Party, remade in his image. And there is an energy around the 78-year-old incumbent that you can’t ignore.
There is a new feeling of optimism and innovation coming out of the States; an acceptance that the “animal spirits of American capitalism” are being fired up again; that deregulation and growth are coming, along with a crackdown on illegal immigration and state profligacy, courtesy of Elon Musk’s ambitions at Doge, the new department of government efficiency.
Trump is promising a new golden age of America. Time will tell what he achieves. Tariffs may certainly backfire.
In his first term, he proved to be more pragmatic than many of his detractors gave him credit for. He has had an impact on foreign policy before he took office, moving forward the Gaza ceasefire and halting, for now, the controversial Chagos deal.
And what of Trump’s recent hyperbolic comments on sending the military into Greenland that horrified so many? Last week, our foreign secretary David Lammy clarified that pushing back on growing China and Russian influence in the area would be a positive, not a negative. On the radio today, Lammy went further, saying: “Donald Trump is not a warmonger, and most people in the world are glad he is back in power.”
Our foreign secretary – who previously described Trump as a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” – now praises him as “gracious and generous”, and that he will curb “malign authoritarian” leaders by “keeping them guessing”.
The following statement is going to have many of you recoiling, but Lammy is right – it is time we embraced some Trumpism here in the UK. Trump undoubtedly won the election by focusing hard on voter wishes, pumping an optimistic “America First” economic growth strategy, and pushing back on years of uber-liberalism and growing illegal immigration that have left huge swathes of the United States feeling left behind and under-represented.
Those same forces of division are operating here. We saw it first with the Brexit vote – which was, essentially, a “Britain First” movement – and now the rise of Reform. Across Europe, economic inertia is giving rise to far tougher talk on immigration and the rise of far-right parties. And it is better to harness that unhappiness and disillusion and turn it around before it spirals out of control.
Yes, there is a long list of Trump unacceptables: bullying people, making derogatory comments about literally everyone, using elected office to enrich family members, fomenting dangerous conspiracy theories, appointing headcases, denying climate change…
You may wholeheartedly agree with Joe Biden, who last week accused Trump of establishing an oligarchy that will “threaten our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom”. But it is worth looking behind the bluster, the storming of Capitol Hill, to the meat of what Trump’s team are promising and weighing up what we should adopt here.
We need to start to question how the ruling left-leaning ideology of progressive liberalism that has dominated our elites for so many decades is beginning to eat its own face in the West. A depleting appetite for risk, economies ossified and over-regulated, a lack of confidence, a growing feeling of malaise, and lost productivity are all going to continue to cause electoral upheaval. It is a decline that needs to be gripped.
Centrist liberal policies heralded by the Clinton administration, embraced by Tony Blair, the Conservative-Liberal coalition, the contradictory actions of the last years of Conservative rule, and the first six months of Keir Starmer, have prioritised everything but economic growth.
To take Starmer’s first six months: he promised growth would be his number one priority and yet he has worked directly against it, talking down our economy and expecting business to swallow punitive, costly new measures and still expecting it to be able to invest.
To date, no economist – or many in the Labour Party – can discern a comprehensive plan for growth from Starmer’s team. Last week, the eminent Oxford political scientist, Professor Ben Ansell, asked in a long, brilliant piece, what is Labour’s theory of growth and concluded there was no answer.
Over the last 30 years, we have enforced successive waves of minority rights, worker’s rights, equality rights, and even animal rights. On repeat, there’ve been above-inflation increases to the minimum wage, huge growth in our taxpayer-funded state and civil service, and an ever-more complicating tax and legal system.
Huge societal inequalities remain. But if we are to beat those inequalities back further, the focus needs now to switch to economic activity – and that entails establishing a new hierarchy, with growth firmly at the top.
We live in a “vetocracy”, where pressure groups and NGOs work counter to each other and counter to any industrial strategy. This must be unwound. We build nothing, and what we do – think HS2 – gets cancelled because of unacceptably high costs, many of which are due to the thousands of claims against it. Everyone is well meaning. Everyone is defending their perfectly defendable corner. But we are strangling our own economy.
We have 3.3 million people claiming sickness benefits, many of them in their twenties, with 2,000 signing up every day. We have a health system that does not function anymore, but we refuse to countenance radical reform. We cannot keep borrowing in the hope that at some point it comes good.
We need innovation, optimism, confidence, brutish adherence to innovation and investment, a rolling back of the ever-increasing tax-funded state, and focus on a tax system that boosts investment and encourages small- and medium-sized business owners and entrepreneurs to believe they can take risks and see the rewards.
And yes, controlling immigration does matter. Rewarding those who break our laws to get here, while punishing those who wait politely in the queue, is not fair.
This is all I am trying to argue: a rebalancing, an acceptance the pendulum has swung far enough. We need homes built, and new infrastructure prioritised over a £100m bat safety barrier. We need some radicalism.
Britain needs a bit of Trump.
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