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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Didn’t Keir do well? He got out of the Oval Office without being humiliated. He dodged that question about Donald Trump’s desire to annex a country of which King Charles is head of state. He coaxed from him a casual pledge to always stand with the British, organised a summit of mostly European leaders and refused to be goaded by slights from the yapping dachshund of a vice-president.
I do not mean to mock Starmer. He has shown strategic steadiness and was duly praised in parliament on Monday. A former Conservative foreign secretary said he had “not put a foot wrong” while the Liberal Democrat leader gushed that Britain was “leading the world, as we have so many times in the past”.
It is clearly nice to have a premier who does not act like a gibbon on the world stage. But we are discussing, in platitudes of performance, a climate in which a visit to the country’s closest ally carries the jeopardy of an episode of Squid Game. Success is avoiding humiliation, dodging tariffs and salvaging Nato. And within days Trump was choking the fight out of Ukraine. The world has changed but Westminster has not caught up.
The prime minister is right to fight for the Atlantic alliance but this is fostering a residual hope that normality might still be recovered. The right words are being uttered but MPs on all sides are visibly clinging to the hope of Trump-whispering the president back inside the tent. This is worth the effort, but no longer a rational basis for planning.
Watching Monday’s Commons debate was to view a body politic still not adjusted to a changed world in which the rock of western security is now, at best, a chronically unreliable ally. Few addressed the magnitude of deploying British troops to Ukraine. It reminded me of the first weeks of Covid-19, before the deaths and lockdown — in particular of Rishi Sunak’s March 2020 Budget, which continued with the priorities of Boris Johnson’s government as if its entire agenda was not about to be consumed by an already visible crisis.
Something similar is happening now. Starmer and his team see the gravity of events but politics still lingers in that half world of both knowing and not knowing. MPs applauded his pledge to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP (and the vaguer promise to reach 3 per cent some time in the next parliament) even if some lament cuts to foreign aid to fund it. Yet all know this is not enough. A timeframe of up to nine years is nonsense for what many already consider an inadequate uplift.
To use Starmer’s own vernacular, rearmament for a new European security architecture is now one of the UK’s central “missions”. But Labour has yet to digest the consequences for its own agenda. Thus far, the Treasury is not planning beyond the 2.5 per cent pledge. The current spending review, due in June, is not designed to free up even more money for defence.
This is all too modest. Holding this line is gambling with the nation’s security. The notion of no increases beyond 2.5 per cent till at least 2028-29 is no longer credible. It’s a new reality to which the government has yet to adjust.
Tories talk of finding savings in welfare but significant cuts are already planned and may be used for meeting the chancellor’s fiscal rules and funding other programmes, including spending some of the savings on getting young people back to work.
The Treasury has refused to countenance changing its fiscal rules — as Germany spectacularly did this week. It also refuses to go back on Labour’s pledge not to raise the main taxes. Some off-books borrowing option may emerge but formal debt is already too high at 95 per cent of GDP. And the UK has yet to feel the impact of any Trump tariffs.
Stealthy revenue-raisers may be found, although party strategists worry that public support for Ukraine will fade if the price is higher taxes. But this is no longer about Ukraine. It is about the security of Europe.
The scale of the challenge means it cannot be finessed within existing plans. Once that is accepted, unpleasant truths await. If the Treasury red lines hold, the cost of re-arming will have to be borne in billions of extra cuts that Starmer, his chancellor Rachel Reeves and most Labour MPs look unready to contemplate. Starmer must prepare voters for hard choices — if not tax rises then unmet ambitions.
If the re-arming of Britain is truly the mission it should be, Labour will be forced to address which priorities to downgrade. Is it the net zero decarbonisation targets, which already face significant political backlash? Which clean energy investments will be diverted? Supporters will argue that achieving energy independence is now even more urgent but the already stretching 2030 target is likely to slip further.
Which infrastructure projects will wither for lack of funds? What about those new towns envisaged by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner? Which public services will be further cut or see improvements delayed? The UK must also look at its own resilience planning and perhaps the subsidy processes that allowed it to lose an AstraZeneca vaccine plant.
Labour needs to start this conversation with both itself and the country. There is still too much business as usual; too much wishing and deflecting. Preparing for a world without US security guarantees is now a primary mission and British politics must catch up with the implications of that reality.
robert.shrimsley@ft.com
