Keir Starmer's flattery of Donald Trump shows UK's lost global clout

The National

07-07-2025

PRIME Minister Keir Starmer has become a cringing embarrassment in his pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump, the American wannabe dictator and knock-off watch salesman.
On Friday, 4 July, Americans celebrated their Independence Day, when their nation rose up to overthrow a deeply corrupt, capricious monarch who put himself above the law.
How's that working out for them?
On Starmer's recent trip to the G7 summit in Canada, we had had the toe-curling sight of him literally on bended knee before Trump, picking up papers that the president had carelessly scattered on the ground.
There's a perfect metaphor for the so-called "special relationship" right there, the one that only exists in the heads of British politicians trying to persuade the public, the UK is something more than a middle ranking European state that trades heavily on nostalgia and exceptionalism.
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As if that wasn't nauseating enough, over the weekend, Starmer told BBC Radio 4 that he understood what the president cares about and that he had bonded with the serial adulterer and adjudicated rapist over shared family values.
Maybe Starmer was just trying to save the NHS a bit of money on stomach pumps and vomit inducing medication.
Claiming to have bonded with Trump of all people on "shared family values" is a bit of a stretch, even for a politician as mendacious as Starmer. Who knew that enabling genocide was a family value? Family that slays together stays together.
The real question here is who is the audience for this utter drivel?
Starmer is a confirmed liar who practices deception on an industrial scale, but he's not stupid. On the other hand, Trump is deeply stupid and is highly susceptible to flattery.
The saying "flattery gets you nowhere" does not apply to Trump, who has spent his entire life in search of attention, money, and validation. The audience for Starmer's toadery is Trump himself.
In publicly appeasing Trump in this way, Starmer is revealing the true powerlessness and isolation of post-Brexit Britain.
The UK cannot stand up to Trump, because outside the EU, the UK is uniquely vulnerable to the unpredictable whims of the man-baby in the White House.
Traditionally British politicians, steeped in the classical education imbued in English private schools, have liked to portray the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US as rather like the relationship between Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.
The Greeks provided intellectual heft, cultural depth, and literacy to the brash upstart Romans, but this conveniently overlooks the reality that Rome had conquered Greece. The Greek scribes who carried out the administrative work of running the Roman Empire and the Greek tutors who taught the children of the Roman patricians were typically enslaved.
Starmer might not be enslaved, but his relationship with Trump is all too clearly that of a client and a master. Starmer's role model in his dealings with Trump is the obsequious and lickspittle Dickens character Uriah Heep. Just like Heep, Starmer's insincere sycophancy is a mask for his selfishness and malice.
The Scottish Greens have sharply criticised Starmer and accused him of glamourising his relationship with Trump.
Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman said that under Donald Trump, the US "is in turmoil."
She said: 'His administration is sending innocent people to be tortured in foreign countries, he's just passed a bill that will strip 17 million Americans of their healthcare, he's begun an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the poor to his billionaire supporters, and he has openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
'For a UK Prime Minister to sit there and talk about his shared values with this President should set off alarm bells in every institution and every voter in this country.
"Cosying up to a racist, misogynistic, climate-wrecking authoritarian like Donald Trump is the last thing we should be doing."
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Chapman said that "if we don't have our values, we have nothing", as she added: 'While values may be a flexible concept to Keir Starmer – if you don't like his values he, opportunistically, has others – it must not be for our country."
Meanwhile the murky depths of Starmer's genocide enabling family values continue to be covered up by the British media, which with the exception of this newspaper has been silent on the extent, impact or legal status of the more than 500 surveillance flights over Gaza the RAF has carried out since December 2023.
The Ministry of Defence continues to stick with the line that the operations carried out by Shadow R1 aircraft based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus are designed purely to assist with the discovery of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
If true, this would mean that the British Government puts more effort and resources into freeing Israelis taken captive in Gaza by Hamas than it puts into freeing British citizens taken captive in Iran or Afghanistan, like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual citizen who was detained in Iran from 3 April 2016 to 16 March 2022, or elderly British couple Peter and Barbie Reynolds who were detained by the Taliban in February.
However thanks to work by campaigners, independent journalists and pro-Palestine MPs, we know both that the flights are continuing to operate – as they did even throughout the ceasefire – and that spikes in the number of RAF flights have coincided with especially deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza. This suggests that the UK is an active participant in Israel's total war on Gaza and that the UK may be complicit in genocide.
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This complicity is taking place to the deafening silence of the British media, which has given more considerably more airtime to the death of a young football player in a road traffic accident than it has to the actions that the British Government is taking to assist in the destruction of Gaza and Israel's attacks upon its civilian population.
The British media is failing dismally in its duty to hold power to account.
We are used to this in Scotland, where the only power that gets held to account is the devolved power of the Scottish Government.