Britain Must Liberate Itself From The US Empire

‘Decisive’ would not be the first adjective one would use to describe Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. 

From U-turns on winter fuel payments and the two-child benefit cap, to the sheer embarrassments of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, his government has been reactive, passive and devoid of any meaningful plan. Until now, Sir Keir’s foreign policy could be summed up in a single photograph taken at the G7 summit last year. Depicting the Prime Minister falling to his knees to pick up papers dropped by US President Donald Trump, who stands towering over him, the image needs no explanation.

Consequently, very few would have anticipated Sir Keir’s comments on ITV News two weeks ago.

Speaking to Robert Peston, he declared: ‘I’m fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up… because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world.’

Whilst the White House may relish comparisons to Putin, such is Trump’s admiration for the Russian leader, it is clear that Starmer’s words carried great significance. They are testament to a President-Prime Minister relationship that has soured since the US’ Operation Absolute Resolve at the start of the year. 

Trump’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his home in the nation’s capital Caracas was the first in a series of unilateral, extrajudicial moves that Starmer initially tried to tactically brush off. The joint US-Israeli offensive on Iran, which sent oil prices skyrocketing beyond $100 per barrel due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, evidently brought the Prime Minister to breaking point. As airstrikes hit RAF bases on Cyprus and targets across the Gulf, Sir Keir finally realised that enabling President Trump has made his job harder, not easier.

This realisation, although painful for a government previously so keen to pacify its domineering counterpart, presents the Prime Minister with an unparalleled opportunity. For the first time since WWII, Britain may, at last, be able to challenge its toxic Special Relationship and break the shackles that have bound this country to a towering US Empire for far too long.

That opportunity is, for the sake of both Britain and Sir Keir, simply too good to pass up.

Special for some

First stressed by then-Leader of the Opposition Sir Winston Churchill in his 1946 Iron Curtain Speech, the Special Relationship between the United States and United Kingdom has taken on a different dynamic of late.

Jeremy Shapiro, former US state department advisor to President Barack Obama, said as much in 2017. In reference to his time working for Obama, who famously maintained a frosty relationship with then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Shapiro stated: ‘It was very important for us to mention the special relationship in every press conference that we had when the UK were here.’

‘But really,’ he admitted, ‘we laughed about it behind the scenes.’

In 2009, when Brown visited the White House, he gifted Obama a pen holder crafted of wood from the HMS Gannet, an anti-slave ship formerly named the HMS President whose timbers were used to build the desk in the Oval Office.

Obama duly gave Brown 25 DVDs in return.

From a position of equal strength post-WWII, the UK has since fallen to one of submission, allowing for the sort of degrading antipathy represented by Obama’s box sets.

This extends far beyond the realm of diplomacy; the United States has had its way with the British economy for decades. In his 2024 book Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, entrepreneur Angus Hanton lays bare the extent of the damage. Sales by US multinationals are now estimated to be some 25% of UK GDP, far higher than any other European nation.

Since Brexit, too, US private equity firms have swooped into the City of London, picking off undervalued targets and redirecting their cash flows across the ocean. Unsurprisingly, according to AI market intelligence company Gain, 5 of the 10 largest corporate investors in the UK are based in the United States and just 4 are British. This makes it increasingly difficult to raise corporation taxes and leaves Britain acutely vulnerable to events and policy decisions out of its control thousands of miles away.

So, two simple questions follow: who is the special relationship still serving on this side of the Atlantic? And why has Britain persisted with it for so long?

Outsourcing England

The modern British state is characterised by a desperation to pass the buck, often for American benefit.

According to the National Audit Office, Parliament’s spending watchdog, Boris Johnson’s government paid £1 million per day to consultants from New York-based Deloitte to improve its Test and Trace App during the pandemic. The app failed on its main objectives despite eyewatering costs, wrote Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, in 2021. She noted: ‘The continued reliance on over-priced consultants who “delivered” this state of affairs will by itself cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.’

Matters of life and death are, of course, the last things that the UK Civil Service is prepared to take responsibility for. 

Because of that entrenched philosophy, our lives are now, for better or for worse, firmly in American hands. The UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent, which protects the country from nuclear attack, relies on US support to remain active. In fact, because the deterrent has failed two consecutive tests and appears entirely unfit for purpose, we seemingly owe our security even more-so to an American-dependent NATO that Trump explicitly sees no future in.

The British state has, for reasons of convenience, cost and cowardice, outsourced basic functions such as these to others without a stake. For that reason, it will be unsurprising when Trump and the States, like the ‘vampire kangaroos‘ at Australian-based Macquarie who ran the UK’s water supply into the ground, flee the sinking ship before getting wet.

An opportunity of a lifetime

This leaves Sir Keir with a golden opportunity.

Trump is hugely unpopular with the British electorate; just 16% of Britons have a favourable opinion of the President according to a YouGov poll from January this year. Yet Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the Labour government’s biggest threat in terms of polling, continues to stand by the US leader unconditionally. That is a rhetorical weapon that, if used by Starmer to punish Farage, might possibly fend off a Reform government.

But beyond party politics, liberating the UK from its American shackles will not be easy. In fact, it will require the fundamental re-alignment of an entire nation.

Nothing can be off the table in this process. Lawyers asking to reassess the UK’s extradition treaty with the US because of ICE misconduct must be listened to. Military figures sceptical about the some 12 thousand US military personnel and hundreds of intelligence agents deployed in Britain must have their doubts acknowledged. And a Prime Minister who has only now decided to tentatively challenge the President must be encouraged to go toe-to-toe in true Hugh Grant-Love Actually fashion.

If not now, when?