Britain and the US are being split apart by growing extremism
• Both countries are in a prolonged period of disorder
In 2016, the Anglo-Saxon world became the global centre of populism with the Brexit vote, the Trump election and the disputes that followed. Both countries had a hardwon reputation for political stability: Britain had avoided the continental affliction of revolutions since 1660 and the US had withstood the economic hurricane of the Great Depression with its democratic foundations enhanced. Yet both countries are now in a prolonged period of disorder: Britain has burnt through prime ministers with an Italian relish (Theresa May followed by Boris Johnson followed by Liz Truss followed by Rishi Sunak), and Donald Trump — acting like a Latin American dictator — trashed every institution he touched, including the military, the CIA and Congress itself.
Which country has suffered the most from all this disorder?
This is a particularly good time to offer an answer to the question partly because the US midterm elections come six years after Trump’s election shocked the world and partly because Britain has just endured a change of prime minister.
At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Not only is Trump likely to declare that he is running for the presidency again, but many of the most prominent Republican candidates for office in Tuesday’s elections are Trumpists in both style and substance — celebrities and political neophytes who want to burn the establishment down.
The Washington Post calculates that 291 Republican candidates, more than half of the total, have questioned the result of the 2020 presidential election, with the majority of them favoured to win.
Britain looks relatively stable by comparison. Sunak is a technocrat (and former banker) who believes in sound finance and balancing the books. At the COP27 meeting in Sharm ElSheikh, Egypt, for example, he seems to have established a cordial relationship with his fellow technocrat (and former banker), French President Emmanuel Macron.
Thanks partly to Trump’s intemperance, and partly to the radical left’s growing strength and self-confidence, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden has abandoned the middle ground, pursuing an expansionary economic policy despite rising inflation and misinterpreting civil-rights protests as a signal to go soft on crime.
In the UK, by contrast, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has expelled his extremist predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and is doing his best to choose moderate candidates for the next election. He is focused on winning back the white working class rather than tickling the erogenous zones of woke activists.
TRUMPIST POLITICS
But look again and British politics is not quite so reassuring. The “Trump” wing of the Conservative Party is both bigger and more entrenched than Sunak’s rise might suggest. He lost badly to Truss in the last leadership election though his track record as a minister was more impressive than hers.
Truss enacted a wishlist of policies that had been cooked up in think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Taxpayer’s Alliance, and discussed at Tory Party socials. Tory papers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph first backed her campaign against Sunak, ridiculing his warnings about the consequences of her policies, and then greeted her budget as if it were the economic equivalent of the Second Coming of Christ.
Sunak has included several people in his cabinet who have a distinctly Trumpist feel to them. Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has dubbed the arrival of refugees on small boats an “invasion” and proclaimed that her dearest wish is to see refugees transported to Rwanda.
Kemi Badenoch is waging a war on woke. Leading Conservative ministers seem to have a Trump-like contempt for both “good practice” and the civil service: Gavin Williamson, who was once sacked as secretary of defence for leaking, has now resigned from his new job as minister without portfolio over, among other things, an accusation that he told a public servant to “slit his throat”.
This might read like small beer compared with Trump and the Trumpists. Former prime minister Boris Johnson’s presence at Sharm el-Sheik demonstrates that he is a very different figure from Trump. Johnson merely flirted with the idea of ignoring the 1922 Committee’s decision to unseat him. Trump instigated a violent assault on Congress that included several people who ran for office this November.
But in two important ways, Brexit has caused more longterm damage. The most obvious is economic. Trump’s combination of tax cuts and deregulation were widely welcomed by business, whatever it felt about his cultural policies. Brexit was solidly opposed by the British business establishment, and for good reasons.
There seems to be no doubt that Brexit has caused significant damage despite the difficulties of disentangling the effects of Covid-19 and the Ukraine war from the effects of leaving the EU. Brexiteers have all but given up arguing that the divorce is an economic boom and resorted instead to saying it is too early to tell.
In June 2022, the Centre for European Reform (CER) estimated that quitting the single market and customs union reduced UK goods trade by about 15%. In the same month, the Resolution Foundation warned that workers can expect to be almost £500 a year worse off in real terms by 2030, thanks to the productivity sapping impact of Brexit, with the worst effects experienced by advanced manufacturing and the north of England.
A recent report from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) claims that trade from the UK to the EU has declined by 16% since January 1 2021, and trade from the EU to the UK by 20%. Truss’s budget was driven by the recognition that the only way to turn Brexit into a positive was to administer life-threatening shock therapy.
It is, of course, possible that Britain will rejoin the EU in the longer run. The proportion of Britons who think that leaving the EU was a good thing is falling, and the next general election is shaping up to be Remainers’ Revenge: where the emerging anti-Brexit majority avenge the turmoil that unleashed since 2016. But rejoining the EU — if it will have Britain back — will take some time. And the messy business of leaving has wrought long-term damage, while also distracting the country’s collective attention from directly addressing questions of productivity.
The second long-term consequence has to do with the UK’s future. In September 2014, it looked as if this question might have been solved for a generation when the Scots voted 55% to 45% to remain part of the country. Brexit reopened the question by first dragging Scotland out of the EU against its will and then creating turmoil in Westminster, as a predominantly English party, the Tories, tore itself apart over what Brexit meant.
In Scotland’s May 2021 election, the Scottish Nationalists won 64 seats to the Conservatives’ 31, the party’s fourth victory in a row. Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, claims to be more intent than ever on holding another referendum.
In Northern Ireland, where the majority of people also voted to remain in the EU, Brexit has paralysed politics for six years and revived difficult questions about the Irish border. The pro-unification Sinn Fein is now the biggest party on both sides of the frontier.
It takes a great deal to outwreck the great wrecking ball that is Donald Trump. The US may have a record crop of Republican election-deniers, but the Brexiteers still have the edge in breaking a country apart.