Britain’s response to this global uncertainty beggars belief. On the one hand, we are turning our backs on the European Union, trying and failing to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the world’s most successful – even if imperfect – diplomatic and trade alliance. On the other, we are putting ever greater store in the “special relationship” with the US, just at the very moment Trump is undermining multilateralism and co-operation in the west. [...]
Second, Trump’s values fundamentally clash with those of modern Britain. Attitudes to immigration in Britain have become more, not less, positive in recent years; where issues about immigration exist, they are driven mainly by pragmatic concerns. The proportion of people whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to other ethnicities or religions shrank from 13% in 2011 to 5% today. The president, on the other hand, was comfortable using his visit to sound his anti-immigration dog whistles and to continue his hateful attacks on Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. On Thursday, it emerged that one of Trump’s envoys complained to the British ambassador to the United States about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, for disrupting a British trial. [...]
But there is one big difference: while the global might of the US imbues Trump with the power to act unilaterally, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have an utterly inflated view of Britain’s place in the world that harks back to Britain as a 19th-century colonial power. They want us to leave a trading bloc, whose rules and regulations we have had a powerful role in shaping, in order to become a rule-taker through free trade deals with economies much bigger than ours. The US would undoubtedly dictate the terms of a trade deal with Britain – a race to the bottom on regulatory standards.
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