The nationalist trap

With all eyes fixed on the US President’s premeditated drive to withdraw support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, an important related development deserves urgent analysis in the UK.  Donald Trump is not known for offering concessions to other countries without significant concrete benefits in return, for both himself and the US economy.  He is well known, however, as a determined critic of the European Union, who seeks to disrupt and weaken European unity.  His deliberate hints to Keir Starmer, when they met in Washington on 27 February, that the UK could obtain a favourable, deliberately ‘sweetened’, free trade deal with the USA, as well as secure American support for its actions over the Chagos Islands, must be seen in this context.  Brexit Britain is now inevitably pushed towards stronger military collaboration with France and Germany to counter growing Russian pressures on Europe’s doorstep, while the US improves relations with Vladimir Putin and deprioritises Europe’s defence to focus on containing China.  Conscious of this, Trump and those around him probably perceive a new opportunity to pursue an anti-EU agenda by hugging Britain closer as it develops its future role within European security planning.  His key objectives would doubtless include trying to align Europe with specific US anti-China trade policies and military postures, winning new European weapons contracts for US manufacturers, and, above all, fostering internal policy tensions and differences to divide the European powers. 

This scenario casts new light on the Labour government’s repeatedly stated intention to see the UK functioning as a continuing ‘bridge’ connecting Europe and America in a changed geopolitical environment.  Many commentators, regardless of their preferences, have already rightly pointed to the increasing fragility of any such role as tensions visibly erupt between the two continents.  The risk now looms of this ‘bridge’ evolving into more of a one-way thoroughfare, with Trump’s already considerable leverage over the UK, buttressed by his latest promised concessions to Starmer, exerted as background pressure to indirectly reflect US priorities within future UK/EU security discussions.  Trump’s team will have noticed that Starmer has for some time developed a close relationship in Europe with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who has attempted to balance her country’s economic dependency on the EU with increasing admiration for the Trump administration’s support for Europe’s far right.  The latter even led her to vote against Ursula von der Leyen’s re-election as European Commission President last year, marking an unexpected open break with the EU’s dominant centre right political camp after signalling considerable earlier warmth.

It is apparent that the UK retains powerful and longstanding economic and military ties with America.  The emergence of the USA as a great industrial nation in the late nineteenth century was significantly financed by City of London interests investing heavily in America’s new railroads and factories.  When the US overtly replaced Britain as the world’s strongest economy after the second world war, the City found itself a new role in dominating the Eurodollar market (US dollar denominated bank deposits outside of North America and its banking regulations) across the globe, drawing on its unique historical connections with both American and world-wide financial operations.  Today, while the Westminster government claims it can both sustain the ‘special relationship’ with an ardently protectionist USA and secure a ‘reset’ of relations with Europe, closer examination of specific policies reveals a marked leaning towards the former.  Rejoining the EU’s single market or customs union is repeatedly ruled out, despite their evident advantages for UK trade volumes, while Labour has been lobbying hard for a free trade deal with the Trump camp, discussing it with the US Heritage Foundation before the 2024 UK general election.  US multinationals now own $1,100 billions of UK assets (including formerly British-owned strategic technology companies), with their average tax returns to Britain limited to just five percent of profits.  Military links include professional training, contingency logistical support, chemical warfare research, US maintenance and development of the UK’s supposedly ‘independent’ nuclear missiles, as well as the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance.  However, Trump’s administration is currently busy taking factional political control of the leadership of the US armed forces and intelligence services.  Its hostility to the Canadian government has already triggered calls there to withdraw from ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing.  The reliability of future UK military and intelligence cooperation with the US is now in doubt as narrow US protectionism dominates the Trump team’s foreign policy objectives and the interests of old allies are swept aside.  

At the same time, the EU constitutes Britain’s largest trading partner, accounting for over fifty percent of total UK overseas trade.  Britain is ultimately not wealthy enough to ‘go it alone’.  The key question is which overall future economic direction will help the UK to finally start to address its distinct structural economic problems of low productivity due to under-investment, severe wealth and regional inequalities and declining workforce and broader social cohesion:  Europe’s emphasis on stronger continent-wide industrial and environmental security, and on integration incorporating mutual subsidies and support for EU member state economies, or Trump’s prioritisation of US corporate profits?   British opinion polling unsurprisingly already reveals increasing disapproval of Brexit and its negative economic repercussions.^[1]

The Rising Price of Labour’s Nationalism

A reassessment of the unusual nature and unfolding political price of the Labour Party’s sharp ‘nationalist turn’ under Keir Starmer is therefore timely.  To date, this has leaned heavily on two ‘flag waving’ themes, both seriously detrimental to the UK economy – distance from the EU and tight restrictions on immigration.  This has jarred with the long-standing prevalent British culture of quiet restrained patriotism, reflecting established traditions of tolerant individualism and a steadily developing familiarity with ethnic minority communities.  It emerged from strictly electoral calculations concentrated on winning back 2019 ‘Red Wall’ Tory voters.  No deep-seated and complex cultural phenomenon like British national sentiment, however, can be simply subordinated to immediate electoral tactics without ongoing consequences.  It has long been clear that, in times of economic crisis and disillusionment, the normally tempered majority patriotism found in contemporary Britain can be warped to reflect aspects of the anti-foreigner nationalism commonly displayed by a (usually ageing) minority, triggering social divisions and conflicts.  Yet Labour made no attempt to devise a more nuanced patriotism, incorporating liberal, egalitarian or more inclusive themes.  This sustained narrow focus effectively deprioritised such serious issues as the UK’s future social cohesion, labour supply and trade deficit, yet made noticeably little impact on the final general election result.  Labour’s 2024 vote fell to under 10 million and its share of ‘Red Wall’ votes rose by just 3 points, with the party’s large Westminster majority secured instead by a dramatic 24 point drop in the national Tory vote.^[2]

Disturbingly, Labour’s excessive nationalism inadvertently but predictably reinforced mistaken popular assumptions about the economic impact of immigration, now exploited by the right-wing populists of Reform UK.  Detailed research across 13 countries has confirmed that mainstream political parties’ efforts to accommodate the related policies of radical right campaigns have generally failed to erode support for these extremist movements and, if anything, have boosted their popularity by validating their divisive messages.^[3]  In any case, as the UN-aligned International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has underlined, migration is an important part of the solution to today’s economic challenges, deserving normalisation and not negativity.  It boosts human skills and development and the remittances it provides to migrants’ families in their countries of origin now far outstrip official development aid from the world’s richer states.  In addition, the ambition, innovation and economic activity it regularly fosters considerably outweigh its small-scale negative economic effects inside the receiving countries, despite the persistent false propaganda of anti-migrant populists.^[4]  Now, the likely geopolitical repercussions of Trump’s return suggests that Labour’s Brexit-linked nationalism will increasingly be viewed in a different light – as a validation of extreme right anti-immigrant prejudices, as an obstacle to necessary cooperation with the EU, and as a bolster for Trump’s ‘divide and rule’ approach to Europe.

A New Era

Across our planet, a highly threatening period of intense competition between rival strong alliances – each bringing together authoritarian-leaning nation states and powerful private corporate interests in various forms – is now emerging.  Despite their well-known differences, the USA, Russia, and China all broadly appear to fit this pattern.  Europe, however, with its stronger (if still certainly deficient) democratic traditions, public infrastructure, and social solidarity, offers a model still capable of evolving in an alternative social democratic direction – above all as the negative impacts of hyper-nationalism become clearer.

The deeper causes of human insecurity in this new era include severe environmental degradation, dramatic levels of wealth inequality and unsustainable forms of ongoing economic development. These in turn engender growing geopolitical conflicts over key natural resources, and an associated suppression of internal popular dissent within the competing nations.  Keir Starmer’s apparent plan to strengthen UK military cooperation with Europe, while simultaneously developing trade and economic cooperation with a USA hostile to Europe, appears to be based on outdated conceptions of national security, forged in an era of international cooperation, market-based globalisation, and anticipated steady growth. An updated alternative approach to meaningful security is now required, integrating essential military, economic and social policy objectives in this changing world.

We might commence by recalling the central insights of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophical approach to interpreting today’s complex and discontented societies.  Habermas’s work emphasised the vital importance of sustaining participation in open and respectful public debate over contemporary challenges (which he defined as “communicative action”) to the self-realisation, education and empowerment of individuals and communities and the promotion of rational thinking itself.  He also exposed the social forces which today sharply restrict and narrow the scope of such debate for so many people:  authoritarian states and powerful private sector interests – the latter dominating most contemporary traditional and social media – limit what he termed the “lifeworld” of genuine civil discourse, and erode the fundamental qualities of democracy.  As this new era of rising international tensions dawns, it will be necessary to revive the popular case for universalism, genuine democracy and social justice. 

John Chowcat is the retired general secretary of the education union ASPECT. He was previously assistant general secretary of the union MSF.

Notes

1.  “55% of Britons now say it was wrong for the UK to leave the EU, with just 11% seeing Brexit as more of a success than a failure”. YouGov Polling Report, 29 January 2025
2. J. Kanagasooriam et al “How Britain Voted 2024” Focaldata, 6 July 2024
3. W. Krause, D Cohen, & T Abou-Chadi “Does accommodation work? Mainstream political party strategies and the success of radical right policies” Political Science Research and Methods, Vol. 11 Issue 1, January 2023
4. World Migration Report 2024  International Organisation for Migration, Geneva