THE Labour Government will not respond to every comment from Donald Trump, a senior ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said.
Speaking at the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow on Friday, Pat McFadden said that the Government could not conduct policy by constantly responding to media questions about remarks from the US president or his allies.
It comes after Starmer was questioned on his silence on Trump’s claim that Ukraine started the war in Ukraine.
The Labour leader also failed to criticise Trump for backing ethnic cleansing of Gaza, or for calling Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator”.
He did support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and backed Zelenskyy as an elected leader – but did so without mentioning the US president.
McFadden told a Scottish Labour fringe event on Friday: “I think the UK is potentially in a good position with this [US] administration, if we handle it correctly.
“Handling it correctly doesn’t mean following every twist and turn of every comment, but is focusing on what will actually happen as well as what was said.”
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said separately: “I don't think any gathering of politically interested people can take place right now without appreciating the change that's happening in the international context and where we are and what that will mean for the country.
“Since the end of the Second World War, UK and European defense policy has been very much in lockstep with the United States and has benefited from huge American backing.
“We've been asked to do more and we're going to have to do more. That's true of us and it's true of our European partners.
“I think there are opportunities in that. I don't think it's just about defence spending, I think it's also about the supply chain, the manufacturing behind this, and about our role in the world.
“We have an advantage in the UK in that you have a newly elected, stable centre-left Government for the next four years. That is not true everywhere.
“So people know what they're going to be dealing with and who they're going to be dealing with in the UK over the next few years.
“I see some journalists in the room. A lot of the interviews for any Government minister at the moment are ‘so and so has just said X, what's your response’?
“It’s fair enough on one level, but we actually can't conduct policy like that. We're going to have to take a step back from that.”
Starmer will attempt to balance the UK’s support for Ukraine with the need to keep the US onside when he visits Trump in the US next week.
That task appears to have been made harder in the past week by the growing rift between Trump and Zelenskyy.
The Ukrainian president had said Trump was living in a Russian “disinformation space”, which led White House officials to accuse Zelenskyy of “insulting” his counterpart.
The Americans also cancelled a planned joint press conference in Kyiv, in a sign of a deepening feud between the two countries.
Elon Musk meanwhile suggested Zelenskyy is running a “fraud machine feeding off the dead bodies of soldiers”.
However Trump’s Ukraine envoy, retired general Keith Kellogg, praised Zelenskyy on Friday as an “embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war” following what he described as “extensive and positive discussions” between the two men.
