LONDON — Britain has learned, after a roller coaster year that ended in a tense confrontation over Greenland, that it cannot change President Donald Trump. The more tantalizing question is whether Trump has changed Britain.

A Charm Offensive Meets Its Limits

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s charm offensive toward the president did not spare Britain a fusillade of new tariff threats and stinging social media posts over the British government’s opposition to Trump’s designs on Greenland. Starmer might argue that Trump’s subsequent climb-down validated his emollient approach.

Still, Trump also turned against a deal made by Starmer, which he had previously endorsed, to relinquish a chain of strategically sensitive islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. He disparaged it as an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” handing Starmer’s opponents a cudgel with which to beat him.

On Wednesday, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, parroted Trump’s criticism. “This is surrendering British territory, with a strategic military base on it, for no reason whatsoever,” she said to Sky News, referring to the air base on an island in the chain, Diego Garcia, which is jointly operated by Britain and the United States.

Never mind that Britain began negotiating the return of the chain, the Chagos Islands, under a government led by Badenoch’s Conservatives. Or that Trump’s pique appeared to be caused less by the loss of the islands than by Starmer’s refusal to go along with a U.S. takeover of Greenland.

It was a telling example of how Trump has commandeered the political debate in Britain, often shifting it in his direction. On topics as diverse as immigration, climate change, geopolitics and social justice, Trump has moved Britain’s “Overton window,” the term used to refer to the range of ideas that are considered acceptable to mainstream society.

Trump’s Grip on Britain’s Political Debate

“There’s no doubt that Trump has shifted the center of gravity in British politics,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “Politicians on the right — and not just those who belong to the populist, radical right, but to a supposedly mainstream party like the Conservatives — are prepared to propose policies and use language that hitherto would have been seen as beyond the pale.

“Just as importantly, like Trump, they’ve gotten away with it,” he added, “and, as a result, are tempted to go further and further — all of which has led to both a coarsening and a polarization of debate.”

Even Starmer, a center-left politician known for his tempered style, has strayed into the divisive rhetoric of Trump. Last year, speaking about immigration, he warned that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” if it did not regain control of its borders. (Starmer later expressed regret for those words, which drew invidious comparisons to an infamous speech about immigration by a Conservative Party lawmaker, Enoch Powell, in 1968.)

Under pressure from a right-wing anti-immigration party, Reform UK, which is in turn partly inspired by Trump, the Labour government has adopted strikingly tougher policies toward asylum-seekers. Starmer has posted photographs and footage on social media of young men being rounded up, fingerprinted and interviewed by authorities, and the government has boasted about the removal of almost 50,000 people since it came to power.

Trump’s influence is felt in a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Blue Labour, an activist group that promotes culturally conservative values within the Labour Party, has called on the government to legislate against such policies in hiring, in part to fend off the threat from Reform. The Guardian newspaper reported in October that many British companies were changing their policies in response to attacks on “woke” policies.

Then, too, there is Trump’s insurgency against the establishment, which has its echoes in Britain. This month, a former senior adviser to Starmer, Paul Ovenden, roiled political waters with a column in The Times of London in which he condemned unelected civil servants who, he claimed, waste their time on “political folderol” rather than on issues that ordinary citizens care about.

“The supremacy of the Stakeholder State,” Ovenden called it, in words that bear more than a passing resemblance to the “deep state” vilified by allies of Trump, like Steve Bannon.

Some of the changes in British policies, like the cuts to foreign aid, are driven by fiscal constraints. Others, like the pressure to water down climate change targets, are prompted by fears that they could hamper long-term economic growth. Yet they dovetail with Trump’s agenda.

Calling Out Trump, Carefully

Britain has continued to embrace renewable energy even as Trump has ridiculed the wind turbines that dot the North Sea. “One thing I’ve noticed,” Trump said in Davos, Switzerland, this past week, “is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.”

Diplomats have credited Starmer’s softly-softly approach to the president with reducing the damage of tariffs — the Trump administration signed a first-in-the-world trade deal with Britain — and with keeping Trump more engaged in the war in Ukraine than he might otherwise have been.

Still, said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to Washington, “it did not moderate Trump’s demands for Greenland, while his ill-informed outburst on Diego Garcia was plain nasty. So Starmer has had to call him out publicly on important issues of principle.”

The most vivid example of this came Friday when Starmer rebuked Trump for saying that European troops had “stayed a little off the front lines” during the Afghanistan War. Starmer said his remarks were “insulting and frankly appalling” to Britain, which lost 457 soldiers in two decades of fighting there.

“The challenge,” Westmacott said, “is to do that without provoking even worse reactions from the notoriously thin-skinned president.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Mark Landler/ Doug Mills
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