Britain is skirting the sidelines of the US election - but the ‘Special Relationship’ is getting complicated

An experienced prosecutor becomes a head of a troubled political party, vowing to end a decade of political crisis and wins an election that seemed impossible.

Now, it’s the script that Kamala Harris, the erstwhile Democratic hopeful and now, the vice-president of America hopes would get her to the Oval Office. And it has already worked- in Britain, Labour party’s Keir Starmer displaced the incumbent Conservatives after 14 years in July poll.

The official line from Starmer’s government is unwavering: ON the results of the presidential contest, London will cooperate constructively with whoever emerges the winner.

Still, sources say that the parallels between Starmer and Harris’ backgrounds, beliefs, and rise to the top are pretty difficult to overlook – and some of Starmer’s supporters reckon that the same strategy that took the former to the Johnson Downing Street street might work wonder for Harris as well.

“Really think there are some quite vivid similarities,” his former policy director Claire Ainsley said in a CNN interview. “The very voters that Harris must turnout and mobilise are almost like the voters that Labour needed to convince and get out to vote.”

Ainsley who is now head of Project on Center-Left Renewal at PPI: A Labour Party affiliated political think tank shared the amount of research done after Labour’s electoral triumph to senior Democrats strategists and pollsters at the Democratic National Convention this year.

Her journey was part of a wider exchange of information of information that is already ages old, and bi-directional, but has become an irritating thorn in the side of ex-president Donald Trump in the latter days of a bitter campaign. Trump began an unprecedented assault on Labour on Wednesday in which he said through a lawyer that they had been meddling in the election.

Like it or not, that is where Britain is positioned for whatever side emerges from next month’s election, with all the discussions surrounding trade, Ukraine and where NATO is headed dominating what lawmakers do. “This election is going to have a massive impact on Britain, Britain’s place in the world, and a whole host of other issues that are going to be fundamental to Britain’s future,” former Home and Foreign Office special advisor Ed Owen told CNN.

Of course, this week’s disagreement brings a new focus on the sensitive and often complex transatlantic ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America.

It has become a tradition that leaders on either side have avoided getting involve in politics of the other side. But as discourse gets entrenched in each country that unwritten contract is becoming shakier.

‘We’re in a different world’

This week’s salvo from the Trump campaign against the Labour Party took Westminster aback. Despite this, Trump, who often politically employs the pretext of legal cases, accused Labour of “outright interference in the foreign election,” after several members of the party staff visited four swing states to campaign. Labour has maintained that the trip was during the personnel’s own free time and the personnel had paid their own bills and it was not unlawful.

There is some irony in the accusation; Farage, Truss and other influential figures from the British right have endorsed Trump’s campaign.

“It is a reality that we find ourselves in a different world than the one that was there 30 years ago,” Kardash, a former UN official, said, adding that Truss made her comments this week before the current turmoil eliminated her from the ruling Conservative Party.

Truss pointed an accusing finger at the Labour Party stating there is only one thing that that party has and that is arrogance to offer the American people.

But exemplifying the blurred lines that political tribalism has introduced to the relationship, she insisted that her own visit to the Republican National Convention – and her outspoken support for Trump – was not arrogant: “Because the Labour Party are wrong, and they’ve been an absolute disaster for Britain.”

Of course, there are a lot of areas where Democrats might hope to learn from Starmer’s experience. And both have drawn upon the experience of former leading prosecutors to sound more uncompromising in crime and immigration than previous centre-left candidates – and both have appealed to that old working class whose populations feel alienated from the new economies of their countries.

“Harris has part of the problem that Keir had, which, if he is an unknown entity,” said Josh Simons, a newly-elected Labour MP and the former director of Labour Together think tank. “A big part of her strategy is about reassurance: ‘I am not a closet radical.’ And that, of course, was true of us during the election.”

“Those lessons being bounced back and forth between the two countries,” other than his comment are the words of Josh Freed, a senior vice president for Climate at the Washington DC based Third Way think tank who attended Labour’s party conference last month.

Starmer arrived at the Labour party when it was polling poorly and Harris replaced Cummings in a time when the party’s trajectory did not look promising. Unlike Harris, who joined the Democrat ticket top just a few months before the election, Starmer had time; it took him four years to gradually overturn Labour’s position before this July.

But for once, unlike the Democratic flagbearer, Starmer had the advantage of contesting against an incumbent party which was historically illfavoured by the start of this year. “Labour did not win the election this year, the Conservatives lost it,” Truss a Conservative countered. Indeed the public was bent on delivering the kicking to the conservatives.

‘Deep unease’ in Westminster

Westminster fully knows that Labour government prefers Democratic president; DOI is sister party to Labour and polls have time and again shown that Trump is quite detested in Britain.

‘We are voting for their ideologies’, Mike Tapp, a Labour MP said of Harris’ campaign. “It is beneficial that we are on the same line of thinking, especially in NATO and diplomatic measures in Israel. You can see that that would be a given with Kamala Harris.

From deep unease to a grittily realistic acceptance of Trump as simply one manifestation of a tendency towards populists, far-right, even neo fascist leaders in many developed democracies today, this is what the idea of a Trump term evokes among the party’s lawmakers, said Simons.

Unlike President Joe Biden, however, Harris has not established her political career on foreign policy. “I actually had to look up the term on her,” Simons pointed out, “She’s not an Anglophile in any way really.” And that kind of old, pro-European latent sentiment that still is apparently onboard Biden’s circle, in my opinion, cannot be relied upon. Which in turn calls for far more direct conflict where there is affinity of interest involved.

Could be more with Trump according to the scenario in the pics. More worrying for London, Trump has hedged his support for Ukraine in itsConflict with Russia. A decline in American support for Kyiv means that the sudden shift in policy between Britain and America would be sharp.

Not to mention the fact that the serious and sometimes stuffy Starmer is stylistically opposite from Trump by now. The opportunities for conflict between Trump and Kushner increased with this week’s clash with Trump’s campaign.

However, there are those who believe there could be hope for the future if there were another four years of Trump’s rule. Reflecting on his first stint in power, Owen said: “You had this much more dynamic situation, where effectively, things were up for grabs. … Like all good things this had also a dark side – “You could influence American policy.”

While a malleable foreign policy might be worrisome for US diplomats, for allies of the United States and their diplomats it is laden with opportunity. This at least shows that we can manage (Trump’s unpredictability). We can work with him,” Tapp said.

And Britain has leverage in its age-old toolkit which could help ease the deal with a former president who once gave speeches saying how much he still admires about Britain and the late Queen Elizabeth II. ‘I suspect there is much which Britain has to offer that speaks to (Trump),’ said Freed. It is useful to have the meeting with the King for the United Kingdom the main goal of it. The pomp and circumstance is very similar.”

But a second Trump term is going to be a turning point for the West. I personally have seen many in Britain cringe with memories of the first of such incidents. “It was pretty devastating for the world what happened on January the 6 (2021)” Tapp recalled.

Germany’s Olaf Scholz, for his part, has a tricky reelection ahead of him next year, as does Australia’s Anthony Albanese. Italy’s Matteo Salvini had a rough July for the prime minister of France, the country’s Emmanuel Macron was also weakened. If Harris loses, Starmer might be the last centrist on the block.

“The question becomes for Starmer: What does the world look like under Trump’s America and what pressure does the UK have on its hands to be the leader of centrism, and therefore democracy? Freed said.

Currently, there are very few countries that can boast of early and solid democracies governed by center-left parties. It would all boil down to (Starmer) and to the Labour Party, whether they liked it or not.”