YEARS ago millions of Scots upped sticks and headed out west to make their fortunes in America.
Since the Second World War, British governments have removed all the faff by simply making the UK the 51st state of the USA.
We don’t have voting rights and don’t enjoy the dubious freedoms of gorging on chlorinated chicken or carrying assault rifles in supermarkets, but we at least get to ride along on outrageous foreign policy adventures.
Recent highlights include trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and our complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Keir Starmer on Thursday travelled to Washington DC to swear fealty to the mad king Donald Trump as part of the absurd theatre which animates the “special relationship”.
He arrived back in London on Friday ecstatic, one presumes. His trip was widely regarded a roaring success. Our forelock-tugging vassal Prime Minister pleased Trump, the president saw he was no threat.
To win a Trump smile was the real aim of the mission and, with Starmer’s complete debasement in the president’s court, it was mission accomplished.
But strip away the ersatz glamour of the White House press conference and the real material gains from the trip appear as so much dust in one’s hands.
Hadn’t he gone to Washington to get assurances that Trump would back peacekeeping efforts in Ukraine in the event of the war ending? Hadn’t he wanted to guarantee exemptions for Britain in Trump’s tariff regime?
On the first point, Trump was emphatic. British peacekeeping forces, if we are prepared to entertain this fiction, could “take care of themselves” if Starmer put boots on the ground in Ukraine.
Anyway, Trump isn’t hugely worried about that as he’s got the lucrative Ukraine minerals deal which he will use to exploit the war-torn country’s natural resources for the enrichment of American shareholders.
The interests of America’s richest people being at stake will, Trump calculates, put Vladimir Putin off invading again.
All of that happens with or without Starmer being in the picture and also robs him of his hopes for a “Falklands moment”, to use the nauseating parlance of some in the Labour Party.
And while “tariff”, according to Trump, may be the “most beautiful word in the dictionary”, the fact that the UK runs a trade surplus with the US means imposing them on Britain wouldn’t be very “America first”. Again, this is the case with or without Starmer.
Trump said Britain – which has been waiting five years – could get a deal “where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary”, adding: “We’ll see.”
So what does the president want from Starmer? He wants someone who can plead America’s case in its stead to the Europeans, who seem a touch more wary of Trump than the positively besotted Starmer.
And perhaps to Trump, and only Trump, they allow him into the world of prestige to which he feels entitled – state visits and rubbing shoulders with royalty.
It is tawdry stuff for a tawdry man. Starmer is more than happy to grin for the cameras if it makes it seem like he’s part of the show.
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