The usual media suspects regard Starmer’s charm offensive on Trump as brilliant 3D chess—they’ve been saying that for 80 years
~ punkacademic ~
Feudalism is back in fashion again: although professional historians have their doubts about how real that concept was in the past, it feels pretty real right now, as Keir Starmer’s liege lord arrived in Scotland to receive appropriate tribute from his underlings last week. The customary humiliations of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, and Starmer himself, duly followed.
Trump in Scotland to open his new golf course at Menie was a flex for constituencies at home and abroad. After all, Trump’s destruction of the shallow façade of probity which ineptly masked the reality of American imperialism is fundamental. The White House will be hosting cage fights next year, just as Trump Turnberry holds trade talks. The American state now subsists as an extension of the Trump Organization. Conflict of interest be damned.
The propriety of a sitting President opening a new business venture and hosting world leaders at one of his existing ones may have in the past trifled the liberal consciences of former West Wing addicts, but it barely registers now. Seeing state and capital so perfectly aligned is a textbook example for the anarchist critique of the state as fundamentally the guarantor of capital, which aggro-centrists will studiously ignore.
The court press has fawned with appropriate ceremony. The BBC’s Chris Mason was positively gushing over how Starmer had gained “invaluable access” and “facetime” by playing ball with Trump’s “style”. If the journalism thing doesn’t work out, Mason has a future as Susie Dent’s long-term successor in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, given his impressive range of vocabulary and unparalleled ability to find elegant euphemisms for the simple verb “grovel”.
Starmer’s humiliation as he watched Trump describe London Mayor Sadiq Khan as “nasty” was not, for all Mason’s soliloquies, rescued by his pained and stifled interjection. Nor was Starmer’s gravitas burnished by Trump silencing him mid-sentence as he attempted to respond to a journalist’s question.
Starmer looked like what he is, Trump’s stooge. With a few exceptions, the narrative around the event in the British media followed familiar lines: Britain has a close relationship with the US, Starmer has played a blinder, how jealous the Europeans must be of us. This last rested on the fact that the tribute extracted from the Europeans in the form of tariffs on EU goods was higher than that exacted on the UK. Both are getting ripped off, but the UK a little less, so Starmer is a genius.
It would be unfair to Starmer to think that he is a uniquely delusional Prime Minister in terms of Britain’s relationship with the United States. Arguably every single one of them since 1945 has harboured delusions, necessary ones to their minds no doubt, but delusions all the same. Harold Macmillan envisaged Britain as Greece to America’s Rome; Tony Blair saw himself as having a unique power to persuade George W. Bush, while others felt he was Bush’s poodle.
And of course, the American armed forces that came to Britain in the Second World War have never really left. This was the other side to Trump’s visit. While Britain’s leaders from Starmer to Scottish First Minister John Swinney were humiliated and subordinated in public, something of far greater substance was happening a few hundred miles south in East Anglia.
On Saturday 26h July—the second day of Trump’s visit—a peace vigil took place outside the gates of RAF Lakenheath, as it does every month. These vigils have had additional poignancy of late. It has been suspected for several years that the US has been planning to return nuclear weapons to the American-controlled base. In the course of the past couple of months, it seems to have happened, and more appear to have arrived since.
US service personnel from the squadron based at Lakenheath had their own message to send—selling medallions featuring a nuclear explosion on one side and a Grim Reaper on the other. This they did at the recent Royal International Air Tattoo—basically a big airshow—at RAF Fairford. This is a flex all of its own.
Britain remains, as it has been since 1945, a vassal state of the United States of America. The particular vulgarity and fascism of the current American President simply makes it harder—but, as the British media shows with aplomb, not impossible—to ignore.
This week, the BBC showed the famed nuclear war dramas Threads and The War Game back-to-back. Timely. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate military obscenity, a technology which has only ever been used by the United States in wartime, and which can bring about the end of the world. If Trump’s crass horse-trader politicking shows the state in its most capitalist of guises, the bombs presumably being flown into an airfield in East Anglia shows it at its most inhuman. When Kropotkin said the State meant death, he could not have anticipated nuclear weapons. But he was more right than he knew.
The 80th anniversary of the indiscriminate murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people by these bombs at the hands of the American armed forces will be marked this coming week, with more ceremony in some places than others. The British media will still, no doubt, be reflecting on Trump playing golf.
Photos: Lauren Hurley, Number 10 on Flickr; Lakenheath Vigil for Peace