‘Donald Trump’s Election Means Reversing Brexit Is Now More Urgent Than Ever’

The UK has always been on a sliding scale between the US and the EU. Our architecture and royal family solidly European, our entertainment culture much more American. In terms of politics and business, we’ve always felt like a blend of the two.

And when we were inside the EU, we had an incredibly enviable position in the world for our size. We were in the Single Market of Europe, acting as the “gateway to Europe” for Asian countries, we were in the policy framework of Europe. With our “special relationship” with the US, a term I loathe, but nevertheless, it made us the principal capital for the White House to call to discuss US-European issues.

And we had the Commonwealth which we could balance with the EU and US. We were the connector of it all – a lynchpin of international teamwork around the globe.

The Brexit advocates who pulled us away from that privileged position said that being within the EU was being “shackled to the corpse of Europe” and that as an independent entity, we could partner with the US and Asian countries, especially China, to hitch our trade to faster growing markets and get our own growth soaring as a result.

It didn’t happen. Instead, we just killed the goose that laid the golden egg. However, in the short window of time following the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016, it looked as though the Brexit proponents were going to wrench the UK from the EU’s orbit and push us into the arms of Trump, complete with NHS privatisation on the fast track, chlorinated chicken, hormone treated beef and other culinary horrors in exchange for our… well, we never found something that would be able to penetrate all 50 states and their protectionist walls.

We formally came out of the EU in February 2020, but that was the outset of the COVID pandemic, which occupied nearly all policy bandwidth. We then left the EU transition period in January 2021 when vaccines were rolling out and the end felt in sight.

However, it was the same month that Joe Biden came into power with zero interest in humouring Boris Johnson’s fantasies of a celebratory US-UK Brexit trade deal.

Now Trump is back. But Johnson is no longer in power – it is Keir Starmer who is prime minister. Starmer’s own inclinations and his party will pull in the direction of the EU, but Nigel Farage, in collaboration with elements of Britain’s right-leaning press will try to help Trump throw a lasso around the UK and haul us into America’s partnership, simultaneously punishing Europe but offering the UK rewards to embrace his munificence and betray our neighbourhood.

Get ready to enter a psychodrama tug-of-love over values, culture, economics, and arguments about GDP growth rates versus quality of life, defence, security, innovation and AI regulation. The lot will be fought over.

But wait – there’s more, as they like to say in infomercials. Added to this test of Britain’s transatlantic allegiances and identity soul-searching are the global defence and security issues opened up by Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war in its occupied territories and Lebanon.

Both of these will make for era-defining decisions on America and Europe’s roles in the world. Trump’s mercurial character could tip the dynamics in a number of combinatorial ways that are hard to predict. But either way, that uncertainty leads to one crystal-clear certainty for Europe – it needs to be able to protect its own interests, make its own policy and stand on its own two feet as a global power in its own right. The days of sitting pretty under the aegis of the world’s “only superpower” are well over.

This is why the EU has a sharply-renewed interest in the UK – and Farage and Trump have an interest in spoiling the same. Both have a need for the UK to validate and buttress their version of the world order, now that that world order is split.

The worst thing that Starmer could do would be to stand paralysed in the middle. His natural instincts, as a cautious man, will be to try and seek scraps of self-interest on both sides without becoming over-committal in a way that causes anyone offence.

But now is not the time for middle-of-the-road politics and it would feel like incredibly weak sauce. Further, by not taking any bold action or setting out a bold vision or purpose, it will be other strong voices in the country that will dominate the political conversation, leading Starmer to be a perennial victim of the conversations rather than a leader of any of them.

It’s for this reason that Starmer should use new circumstances to break old straitjackets. Gone in a puff of smoke is the world where Kamala Harris comes to power and we can all sleepwalk “as normal” with no need for Britain to acknowledge Brexit and how it has put the UK in a geopolitically disadvantageous position. Trump is the rude awakening.

The rules of Starmer’s three red lines on Single Market, Free Movement and Customs Union that felt responsible during a general election, no longer are responsible in this new world.

Growth is flatlining in this parliament and global trade wars could take it under. That then opens the threat of Farage and populist surges that predate upon mass discontent.

Starmer promised change – and growth. Where are they? Sitting right there on the Office of Budget Responsibility stats is the huge four per cent drop in growth associated with Brexit.

It can be regained. It’s just there within arm’s reach if we could only cut through all that red tape that is becoming increasingly synonymous with those red lines. And then there is the matter of British values and standards which align much more strongly with Europe than Trump.

All the polls show it. For Britain, for our continent, and for the future of humanity, it’s time for the UK to get back with the European team. That’s not just what we need, it’s also where we belong.