If Britain's leaders acted like Trump they'd stop the boats, start deportations, kill quangos and sack woke civil servants... then perhaps we'd all be rich like the Americans: DANIEL HANNAN.
Published: 16:47 GMT, 22 January 2025.
It was hard to keep up. One after another they came, the sheer speed blurring our sense of what was happening.
Within 12 hours, Donald Trump had made a flurry of announcements and signed 46 executive orders.
The porous southern border would be treated as an emergency! Federal officials who worked from home would be sacked! There would be only two genders! Illegal immigrants would be deported! It was vertiginous, dizzying, exhilarating.
What a contrast to our own passive leaders. Labour – having had 14 years to think how it might trim welfare, reform the NHS or build more houses – came to office and… set up dozens of reviews.
It is true that our two systems are different. American presidents are not constrained by standing apparatchiks in the way British prime ministers are.
Still, to get a sense of what is happening in the US, imagine a new British government, on its first day, ordered the Royal Navy to halt the Channel boats; sacked every ‘diversity, equality and outreach officer’ on the state payroll; made free speech an absolute value in all government actions; started drilling for North Sea oil and gas; began a massive deportation programme; banned positive discrimination in state-funded institutions; told quangos to justify their continuing existence; and ordered civil servants back to the office.
In making that comparison, we get a sense of why per capita wealth in the US has grown two-thirds as fast as in the UK over the past 15 years.
I maintain that Trump is a flawed man. He is boastful, dishonest, vain, needy and, not least, a convicted criminal. But his supporters are prepared to overlook his defects provided he acts as their battering ram against what they see as a remote, self-serving establishment.
Within 12 hours, Donald Trump had made a flurry of announcements and signed 46 executive orders.
The President is the supreme product of our impatient, screen-addled ADHD age. He intuited early on that smartphones would erode the legitimacy of old authority figures. An editorial in the New York Times, a university research paper, a Senate committee finding – these things were suddenly worth no more than anyone else’s opinion on X.
The established authorities might claim he lost the 2020 election. But that was now just one more opinion. And, as Trump pardoned hundreds of rioters who had sought to overturn that result, it was hard to deny his view was in the ascendant.
Understanding that the frontier between the virtual and real worlds is blurred is the key to grasping Trump’s appeal. Many of his announcements were theatrical. Declaring there are two genders is not a policy.
Most of the inanities carried out in the name of transgenderism involve private institutions – businesses, charities, universities. To the extent that government is involved, it is generally a matter for the 50 states rather than for the person in the Oval Office.
But, as the new President well understands, a declaration of this kind sends a message to those private institutions and state authorities. It emboldens campaigners pressing for an end to trans ideology – and demoralises their opponents.
The same virtual politics informs his declaration that the Gulf of Mexico is now the ‘Gulf of America’. Obviously, he is entitled to call it whatever he likes; and, equally obviously, no one is obliged to follow him. But you can be sure that people will follow – not only federal officials but, in time, cartographers and foreign governments. The state of Florida has already been the first to adopt the new name in an official weather warning. In the meantime, Trump has advertised that the US is again restless and powerful within her own hemisphere.
Which brings us to the most significant aspect of what we saw on Monday, namely Trump’s brutal repudiation of the post-war global order. Since 1945, and especially since 1990, we have woven a cat’s-cradle of interconnected institutions that manage and occasionally constrain national governments.
The US, being a great military power, has always been more sceptical than other democracies of some of these institutions. For example, it is one of a minority of states – along with China, Myanmar and Libya – that refuses to acknowledge the International Criminal Court.
But Trump has taken American souverainisme to a new level, repudiating both the global treaties on climate change and the World Health Organisation. He makes no secret of his doubts about Nato, and we can easily imagine him walking away from the United Nations.
The international order to which we have grown accustomed, and which rested ultimately on American participation and American military power, has had its day. Whether Keir Starmer and his fellow international lawyers like it or not, we are back to the age of power politics.
The norms which governed the post-war international order – a preference for democracy over autocracy, a willingness to put international disputes to arbitration and a refusal to allow borders to be altered by force – have been vaporised.
The country which used to guarantee them is threatening force against Panama because it does not like a treaty which it had previously agreed, and is proposing to use trade sanctions against Denmark, a Nato ally, so as to annex Greenland, a territory to which it has never had any claim. Where does all this leave Britain? We ought to be better placed than most countries to navigate this new and more dangerous world. We have the sixth most powerful military on the planet as well as our own nuclear deterrent. And the US should be our strongest ally.
The trouble is, as the rest of the world edges back from the global technocracy that defined the old order, our government is going in the opposite direction, elevating human rights codes and climate treaties over our national interests.
It is sometimes claimed Keir Starmer’s administration has no ideology, but that is not true. We are governed by the kind of finger-wagging legal maximalism that became dominant in the 1990s and was most aggressively pushed by Matrix Chambers – the law firm to which Philippe Sands, who acted for Mauritius over the Chagos Islands deal, and former first lady Cherie Blair, were attached.
It was also the former chambers of new Attorney General, Richard Hermer, who has represented a number of enemies of the British state, having acted for Shamima Begum against the Home Office, and for ex-Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams against IRA victims’ groups.
This attitude is an obstacle in the relations with Trump, who divides the world into patriots and globalists, and who sees Starmer as the supreme embodiment of the latter – a human rights lawyer rather than a national leader.
But it will increasingly set Britain at odds with the rest of the world, too. Other countries can sense which way the wind is blowing, and are recalibrating their foreign policies accordingly. We, almost uniquely, are still arguing for the kinds of global technocracy that are going out of fashion even in Davos.
How long until we get a government prepared to act as immediately, as decisively and as unequivocally in our own national interest as Trump’s?
- LORD HANNAN of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade.
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