The Best President the UK Ever Had?

3,495 words

Prime Ministers and Presidents are both the political premiers of their respective countries, but there is a subtle difference in status between the two. The British Prime Minister (PM) has always operated on the primus inter pares principle first recognized in Imperial Rome: first among equals. The office of President of the United States, however, has far more of a sense of the premier as leader of the nation, “Commander in Chief”, not simply a nominated representative of the ruling party, and Donald Trump is the perfect example of this style of leadership. On his recent visit to the UK, Trump rode through London in one of King Charles III’s horse-drawn, gold-liveried coaches and looked born to it, while Keir Starmer doesn’t look like he could lead a horse to water. Starmer has nothing of the President’s aura of leadership, and it shows in particular when Trump and Starmer meet. Starmer is not taking pressure well, and it is not just coming from his domestic critics, but equally from Trump, who may turn out to be the best President the UK ever had.

The term “war-torn country” is a familiar one in the immigration debate. Last week, politically and socially speaking, President Trump flew into a war-torn country on his ground-breaking second state visit to the UK. Both his own government and that of Sir Keir Starmer are still fledgling administrations, tenderfoot and only in the first quarter of their respective terms, but the similarity ends there. Trump clearly loves America, either that or the façade he and his people have constructed is perfect, while Starmer gives the constant impression that he bitterly despises his home nation and wishes to destroy it, at least for the white British. He knows he is a one-term PM (if he lasts that long), and his Trotskyite past will dictate that he does as much irreversible damage to the UK as he can in the time allowed. (I wrote about Starmer’s Pabloite past here). The PM will have been dreading Trump’s visit because he knew the President was going to corner him on free speech and immigration. Again.

Trump left his own country reeling from two high-profile murders in ten days which make clear the two main threats to whites in the US: blacks and leftists. The killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train by a black man who confirmed on audio that he “got that white girl” was compounded by the fact that the other passengers in the carriage, mostly black, paid the dying girl no attention whatsoever. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was very different, showing as it does the lethal danger presented to whites by a certain faction of other whites. There have now been several attacks in the US tied to the “trans community”, although the Left are outraged that such a link should be made despite its demonstrable existence. Facts and matters of record are anathema to the Left, and the main reason governments in the West dislike visual social media is not because it may harm children (as they claim), but because any white person, should they so choose, could literally spend all day, every day, watching “black fatigue” videos on YouTube.

The British Left are perhaps not as psychotically deranged as their American counterparts, but they are equally deluded, and Trump’s visit predictably agitated them. Possibly the strangest but most revealing example of this comes from a person named Zoe Gardner. Ms. Gardner often appears on the BBC, where she is described as a “migration researcher” or “migration expert.” I wouldn’t want to suggest that the young lady lacks credentials for this title, but I will just note that I have looked for her background in immigration research and I can’t find anything other than a career in comedy. She produced a video which can be seen here from around 40 seconds, The video is just over two minutes, and I urge you to watch it. It perfectly encapsulates the British Left’s extraordinary worldview. I’ve watched it half a dozen times, and I am still baffled. “A darkness is coming”, a slightly panicked Ms. Gardner tells us at the start of the video, against a classic, brooding BBC backdrop. “It’s already engulfed America, and now it’s coming to Britain.”

Two points about the video:

Firstly, the staging and framing. The video features a small logo in the top left-hand corner of the screen which reads “BNN”, and is in exactly the same style as that of the BBC. Many people will not bother to look at it because it is a subliminal marker, like the CNN logo always onscreen on that channel. At one point, a dusky Asian newsreader tells of raids by a government department called the BDL, or “British Defence League”. No such outfit exists, and the reference is to the long-defunct EDL, or English Defence League, run by pariah Tommy Robinson. A presumably AI-generated section of the video shows black-clad stormtroopers kicking down doors (a clear reference to ICE raids in America). People are “literally vanishing” says the newsreader, and this is Britain’s future, apparently hurried along by Trump and his visit. One of the stormtroopers says to camera, “They call it diversity. We call it dilution.” Although most of us on the right would agree with that sentiment, many left-wing people will see this and believe that what they are seeing is a genuine set of BBC news clips, because that is what they want to see. It is a shallow rather than a deep fake, but it is still a fake.

My second point concerns Gardner’s accent, which is a major “tell” by which one can recognize the liberal left in Britain. Gardner is a perfect example of what the English of my generation used to call “horsey types.” She will have taken part in gymkhanas as a girl. But she affects an accent intended to indicate her sympathy with the working class using what has become known as the “glottal stop”, meaning the dropping of the “T” sound when speaking. Thus, someone affecting what used to be called “Mockney” will pronounce the world “later” as “la’er”, with a small gap, in the same way that you will hear Tulsi Gabbard pronounce the name of Hawa’ii. It’s a horrible, utterly fake affectation, and never sounds more bogus than when coming from the mouth of some upper-middle-class activist bimbo telling us that Trump’s arrival is also the arrival of fascism.

Another visit from Trump, a man he and his cabinet have openly insulted, was the last thing Starmer needed. Trump dominates Starmer in terms of personality, and if the President is an Alpha male, then Starmer is some way down the Greek alphabet. Trump’s dominance is made easier for him as Starmer is either using meaningless rhetoric when he speaks, or simply lying. The main press conference illustrates the difference between a world leader and a compliant globalist. Starmer repeated the same lie he has told Trump before, that Britain has a “proud tradition” of free speech, and visibly paled when Trump told the PM bluntly that he needs to use the military to control immigration. When Bev Turner, a reporter with GB News, pointed out that 12,000 people a year are being arrested in the UK for social media posts, Starmer did two things aside from lying about free speech. Firstly, he ignored Turner’s data, which turn out to be correct. This data first appeared in The Times, and is thus behind a paywall, but the figures have been reproduced here in The London Evening Standard. While Britain’s tops the global chart with 12,000 arrests a year (around 33 a day) for online “crimes”, second spot goes to Belarus, with almost half as many. By the time you get to number five (Turkey, of all countries), the number of arrests is in the hundreds. Starmer’s claim that Britain still has free speech is frail but not new, and Trump’s response needs to be put in context by going back to the first two days of September.

On September 1, while returning from the US, an Irish passport holder was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport in London for an offence alleged to have taken place in Arizona. Graham Linehan is an Irish comedy writer who posted “transphobic” comments on social media, and his arrest and detention is exemplary of the state of free speech in Britain. Linehan says he will apply for political asylum in the US, and would be the first person ever to do so on free speech grounds.

After Linehan’s arrest for an online offence allegedly committed in the US, the point was raised that this decision made it conceivable that American citizens could be similarly detained on arrival in the UK for social media comments made in their home country. If this seems fanciful, watch an American citizen – and cancer sufferer – being harassed in her own UK home by a police officer telling her that a complaint has been made against her over a Facebook post (starts at 1:47). He does not tell her either the nature of the post, or the identity of the complainant, but does inform her that if she does not make an apology, she would be “interviewed” at the police station. The American lady’s response is admirable.

Two days after the arrest of Linehan – previously known for his left-wing views – a British politician flew to the US to give evidence before a Congressional hearing on British free speech, but it wasn’t Sir Peter Mandelson, the British Ambassador (to whom we shall return). Instead, Britain’s de facto American ambassador, Nigel Farage, attended the hearing. He compared his country, of which he is widely touted to be the next Prime Minister, to North Korea. Why would the leader of Britain’s Reform UK party be summoned to the US Congress to answer questions about the suppression of free speech in his own country? Why is this the business of the US Government?

An aside concerning Sir Peter Mandelson shows the current state of British politics. The President and First Lady stayed their first night in the US Ambassador’s official residence, Winfield House in London’s beautiful Regent’s Park, and I stated above that the current Ambassador was Sir Peter Mandelson. That was the case when I wrote it, and one might be forgiven for thinking that this was rather decent of the Ambassador to welcome the President and his wife into his grace and favor home (as official government dwellings are called in Britain). Mandelson, however, was fired a few days before Trump’s visit for alleged links with Jeffrey Epstein (Epstein thus continues to haunt Trump, even when abroad), and so the apartment was vacant. But back to the issue of British free speech, or lack thereof.

One of the lies Starmer told Trump and Vance in February was that new British laws on online speech would not affect American companies. The experts think otherwise. Preston Byrne is managing partner at Byrne & Storm, consultants to tech companies on commercial law, and specializing in freedom of speech. Byrne told the UK’s Daily Skeptic magazine of emails from OfCom (Britain’s regulatory media watchdog) to four American tech companies threatening fines for content which, although written on American soil, is accessible in the UK. OfCom also threatened imprisonment in a British jail for those who do not remove offending content. “They have no idea”, Byrne told Britain’s GB News, “what they have woken up”.

American unease at the state of freedom of speech in Europe became apparent on Valentine’s Day, when Vice-President J. D. Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference. The context is important because national security usually concerns external threats whereas, claimed Vance, Europe’s threat was internal. But Vance had not just come to Europe to wag his finger. In March he sent a five-man delegation from the US State Department to the UK to interview Christians arrested for silent prayer outside abortion clinics. The State Department were, their statement read, “concerned about freedom of expression in the UK.” And despite the response of the British media – basically that the US should mind its own business – the USA believes the UK’s new Online Safety Act (OSA) very much is their business. In the Oval Office in February, Keir Starmer told Donald Trump that Britain “has a long tradition of free speech”, true in itself, except that the tense of the verb is now “had.” He also told the President that the OSA would not be used against American companies. That was a far more straightforward lie.

Fact-checking Vance’s speech, Euronews claims that his criticism of the UK is invalid because “free speech in Britain… is clearly enshrined in law”, referring to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This betrays both a naïve belief in the sanctity of European law, and forgets that the UK technically left European jurisdiction after 2016’s Brexit referendum. The EU’s dislike of unfettered speech is plain, and Europe has already attempted to ban X, which brings us to Elon Musk and his interest in the erosion of free speech in Britain.

Musk, President Trump’s loose cannon, has been openly critical of the UK’s abuse of free speech. In particular, he has criticized the treatment of Lucy Connolly, a high-profile case in which a 42-year-old mother was sentenced to 31 months in jail for a Tweet she deleted after four hours. Ms. Connolly was to have accompanied Nigel Farage to the US, but it would have breached the terms of her release from jail.

The OSA is more proof that Britain has been governed this century by a uniparty comprised of Labour and Conservative, the heavy lifting for the Act having been done by the Conservatives and implemented by Labour. The OSA uses the safety of children as a virtual human shield, but its aim is clearly to silence dissenting adult voices. It can be skirted by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which is why the government has told the press that the potential banning of VPNs is “under constant review.”

Article 19 is an organization which rates freedom of speech globally, and in its latest report Britain has dropped out of the top tier for the first time since records began. Costa Rica, where I am writing this despite being English, is still in the top tier (level with the US), meaning that I am freer to write online in Central America than I would be in my native country because I am constitutionally protected. Nothing the British government is doing suggests things will improve, another reason why Donald Trump might just be the UK’s best-ever American President. He cares for Britain (inspired by his Scottish mother) in a way Keir Starmer does not.

The only way in which Trump’s speech at the State dinner hosted by the King could have been improved is if Starmer had given it himself. Trump went through history, enumerating British influence, and even noting that Britain “destroyed slavery.” A few weeks previously, I listened to a YouTuber relating a conversation he had had with a young, white, English teenager. The boy told him that he had recently attended a class on slavery at his school. Before the lesson started, the class was sternly told than if anyone even mentioned that the British ended slavery, or uttered the name of William Wilberforce (instrumental in that ban), they would be ejected from the classroom. That’s where the UK is now. Trump also named Francis Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Smith, Burke, Newton and Blackstone. Starmer would simply be unable to give such a laudatory speech about his own country. His coding won’t allow it.

On his visit, Trump would not meet with Sadiq Khan, Muslim Mayor of London and another man who despises the white British, due to a long-running feud. The President even had the Mayor barred from attending the State dinner, showing his influence over Britain. Trump has called Khan “one of the worst mayors in the world”, and on this occasion compared him with the black Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson.

Trump attacked many current British sacred cows. He called wind-power a “joke” while standing next to a Prime Minister committed to the farcical “Net Zero” program overseen by his Energy Minister, Ed Miliband. On several occasions, Trump has called Starmer “a nice man”, but never “a good PM.” At last week’s press conference, Starmer was asked by a journalist if Britain was still a Christian country. Starmer’s fumbling reply was that he “had been christened.” Two years ago, the same man could be found telling the press that he was an atheist. At no point in his answer did he state that Britain was still a Christian country, and he hurried on to announcing that the UK “celebrated many other faiths” as well as Christianity. What he actually meant was “instead of.”

When speaking to the press, Trump’s measured drawl occasionally pauses, but the impression is that he is thinking a question through. Starmer says “um” or “er” every second or third world and gives the impression of someone lying his way through a traffic stop. Also, on immigration, Trump relayed how many Latin American countries had emptied jails and mental hospitals in order offload their most unwanted citizens to become the problem of the US. His short comments were full of fact and achievement. Starmer simply padded out his screen time, as he always does, with rhetorical filler. He is forever saying things such as, “we are very aware of the difficult challenges that lie ahead, and we are co-operating with other countries, and I think that’s the right thing to do”, or some other empty concoction. He talks pointlessly, all aspiration and no achievement. If Trump and Starmer were to walk into a kitchen together, the impression is that Starmer would name all the utensils, probably in alphabetical order, and make plans to buy lots more, while Trump started cracking eggs and got on with cooking a meal.

In normal circumstances, the EU would be cackling with glee at Britain’s plight, blaming Brexit for their imminent collapse. But imminent collapse is the new normal in Europe, with both Germany and France in such dire economic trouble they may be forced to default to the IMF (International Monetary Fund), something Greece were forced into back in 2013. France is also seeing its national pastime of rioting in full swing. With the EU apparently about to go up in flames (even the placid Dutch are burning police cars), this is the time Britain should be strengthening its relationship with the US.

Keir Starmer has failed to grasp the state of political entente between America and the UK. His party came to power at the tail-end of Biden’s administration, and the PM was not expecting any interference in British affairs from what they hoped would be an incoming Harris premiership. It was, he supposed, Tim Walz who would have made the speech to the Munich Security Conference.

But Trump’s whispered threat is this; If Britain doesn’t clean house with regard to free speech and its de facto suppression, trade will be affected, and no more “special relationship”. This is muscular politics, alien to the British political class. America has the First Amendment, monolithic and unshakeable since its enactment in 1791. Britain has no such thing, its latest piece of formative legislation concerning free speech being to introduce a definition of Islamophobia which will make it illegal to criticize Islam. To say that free speech exists in the UK recalls a comment made by Robert Mugabe, once the brutal dictator of Zimbabwe. “People are free to speak”, said the tyrant, “and then the government is free to arrest them”.

Commentators in the UK desperately talk of Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 and guaranteeing the rights of the populace, and even the British Bill of Rights of 1689 (which actually makes no provision for free speech). But these are in no way a “British Constitution”, as they are often wrongly described, and both legislative instruments are antique and irrelevant today. Starmer talks of Britain’s “informal constitution”, a meaningless oxymoron made by a meaningless moron.

When President Trump returned to the US, his jet had barely touched down when he showed what power and leadership are, proscribing Antifa (an organization whose members beat journalist Andy Ngo into hospital twice in two years in Portland) as a terrorist organization, and threatening to impeach Ilhan Omar. Air Force One left England on a beautiful late summer’s day. In fact, it was so beautiful and calm that on that same day around 1,000 immigrants arrived from France in inflatable dinghies to despoil the once-beautiful beaches of Kent. If the man in the airplane was in charge, that number would soon be zero, and the British would be free to say what they liked about this migrant “invasion”, a word Trump used on his visit. That is the type of leadership Britain desperately needs.