The Democratic convention in Chicago proved to be a gathering in the great revivalist tradition of America with thousands of the party’s political representatives, delegates, supporters and stars converging to proclaim and celebrate their faith in Kamala Harris.
The uplifting atmosphere was, for many of those there, infectious and intoxicating with heady talk of Harris’s candidacy for the Presidency becoming an unstoppable popular movement that will sweep her to victory in November.
The tributes to the woman of the moment were as effusive as they were consistent. Bill Clinton described her as “the president of joy”, while Michell Obama reflected on “the joy of her laughter and her light”. Oprah Winfrey urged voters to “choose joy”.
One delegate on her way to the Convention on the day of Harris’s speech said, breathlessly: “It’s been an amazing week. We loved Joe Biden but the energy and enthusiasm for Kamala is extraordinary. We’re united and confident that we can take the fight to Trump and win.”

The Democrats have certainly discovered their post-Joe mojo and the Harris/Walz ticket has energized the faithful in a way that few could have imagined just six weeks ago. The key question though is whether this Harrismania reflects a wider shift in the wider electorate too.
Has it changed the fundamentals of the 2024 race – or is this just an outpouring of tribal relief among Democrats not now having to campaign for an octogenarian candidate whose low public ratings were threatening not only to lose the White House but also to unseat representatives facing re-election in the House and Senate?
Does it now put Harris on a course for victory in November – or (as some commentators in the UK have suggested) are we at risk of falling for the hype and the noise, not least because of our own hopes and prejudices about what and who the election involves?
The polls are, for now at least, clear that Harris’s candidature has turned around the fortunes of a party that was looking doomed under Biden. Most pollsters agree that, nationally, she now leads Trump having added up to two to three percentage points, and battleground states like Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina are potentially back in play.
She appears to be playing particularly well with Black, Hispanic, female and young voters, groups her predecessor was struggling to mobilise in anything like the numbers he did in 2020.
Volunteers have been signing up in droves and Harris has been raising lots of money too. In a letter to activists this week, Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Harris/Walz campaign, says that the party has raised more than half a billion dollars in just over a month – “a record for any campaign in history.”
What’s more, Harris has certainly got under Donald Trump’s skin and disrupted his campaign. He has been using his public events over the last few weeks to complain about Biden dropping out and his attacks on his newly crowned Democratic rival have been weak and unfocused.

Yet let’s not get carried away. The boost Harris has given the Democrats has served to make competitive again a race that appeared to be moving away from the party. That’s a big difference to where things stood at the time of the attempted assassination of Trump in July. But it certainly does not represent a decisive shift.
“This election is currently tied,” says Matt Bennett, former Clinton aide and founder of the centre-left think tank, Third Way. “Harris has given us a chance but we need to keep things in perspective. This remains a very tough election to win.”
After all, Trump continues to hold significant leads on key issues voters care about – the economy, inflation and immgration – and senior Democrat strategists remain wary about recent polling, not least because of the experience of 2016 when Trump defied the predictions to beat Hilary Clinton.
This sensible caution appears to have shaped Harris’s own address to the party last week. In a marked contrast to the exuberant joy that had characterised so much of the Chicago convention, her speech was serious in tone and substance, stressing her Presidential credentials.
Dressed in a dark navy suit, she contrasted her approach with that of her maverick opponent who she described as “an unserious man”, and sought to address those issues she is seen as having an electoral vulnerability.
One of those is foreign policy and defence on which she deployed one of her sharpest lines: “As Vice President, I have: confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances, and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Labor Day this coming Monday is seen as the time when many voters start to “tune in” to the Presidential election, and the televised debate between Trump and Harris scheduled for 10th September is going to tell us a great deal about how the campaign will play out.
The debate will also represent the first time since her assumption as the Democrat’s Presidential nominee that Harris will have been tested in a live, unscripted environment.
It is scarcely believable that the current Vice President who as operated at the heart of the current administration for most of the last four years has suddenly emerged as the new, disruptive candidate who has thrown open this election. But that’s where we are, and over the next ten weeks we will find out its impact with real voters.
“Irrational exuberance is deadly in politics and we must avoid it,” says Bennett. “But the last month is what a movement campaign looks like. It might not last and we must not count on it. But it is possible that something big is happening.”

This article was first published by LabourList on August 31st, 2024

With all potential rivals declaring their support for her nomination within hours of Joe Biden’s dramatic announcement on Sunday, Kamala Harris will be crowned the Democratic Presidential candidate at the party’s convention in Chicago next month.
It’s an extraordinary turnaround for a politician who has struggled to make an impact as Vice President in more than three years and who, until the last few weeks at least, had been all but written off as a future commander-in-chief by most political observers here in Washington.
This appeared to be Biden’s view too. After all, a critical reason why he resisted calls to drop out of the race earlier despite widespread public concerns over his age, was that he was the only person capable of beating Donald Trump.
So, was he wrong, and can his No.2 now step up and win the Presidency with barely three months left until the election on 5 November?
Party unityThe overwhelming sense of relief that has greeted Biden’s announcement, and the desire to unify quickly around Harris, has certainly given the party an early sugar-rush moment. More than $50m was raised within 24 hours from small donors and senior Democrats are flooding TV networks to sing the praises of their soon-to-be candidate.
But this temporary honeymoon cannot hide the fact that the challenge facing the 59-year-old former Californian Senator barely three months before the election on 5 November is huge.
First, she is up against an opponent who, since the TV debate with Biden at the end of June, has gathered crucial momentum in the race for the White House. The assassination attempt and his immediate response, followed by a Convention that showed the Republican Party now totally under his control, has given Trump front-runner status.

Money is now flowing into Republican coffers, not least from the likes of Elon Musk and other billionaires keen to align themselves with a potential President who continues to threaten core features of American democracy and promises to cut taxes, wage war on woke and deport 10 million undocumented immigrants.
Second, Harris will need to win support well beyond the Democrat base, to independents and moderate Republicans, if she is to win swing states in November – and there has been little evidence so far of her ability to do so. Her public ratings as Vice President have been historically low and her bid for the Democrat candidacy in 2020 ended even before the primaries began.
She will rightly be able to claim incumbent credit for the successes of the Biden administration, not least the high performing economy and successful industrial strategy. But Harris faces an electorate still angry at cost of living increases and lack of control at the southern border, the latter a particular vulnerability given her role leading the administration’s “Root Causes Strategy” to tackle the drivers of irregular migration.
Third, she will need to break through the last great glass ceiling here and show that a woman can be elected to the highest office in the US. There are many, not least among many Democrats themselves, who still do not believe that Americans are willing to make this important step, and the defeat of Hilary Clinton to Trump in 2016, remains a deep scar.
Making historyWe can certainly expect the attacks on the first Black woman to occupy the role of Vice President from today’s nativist GOP to be brutal and unforgiving. Even before Biden’s announcement on Sunday, senior Republicans were lining up at their Milwaukee convention to target her record and character.
Yet, as ever in politics, the challenges for Harris present opportunities too.
Trump’s star is currently in the ascendancy. But Democrats have demonstrated in mid-term election victories since 2020 that MAGA populism struggles to win over majority opinion. It is beatable and Harris can draw on her strong record as California’s Attorney General until 2017 to prosecute the argument about the dangers of Trump.
Many of Harris’s Democrat friends speak of her “tenaciousness”, values and “political astuteness”, and she is going to need all of these things and more if she is to compete in November. It is also true that few Vice Presidents – bound by the need for absolute loyalty to their boss – rarely have much space to develop their particular identity. She now has that chance.
Perhaps, also, a female Presidential candidate is uniquely placed to mobilise wide political support following the attacks on women’s reproductive rights that we have seen since the overturning of Roe vs Wade in 2022.
Who Harris chooses as her running mate will tell us a lot about how she will seek to campaign and fight the coming election. Early frontrunners are three male Democrat governors, Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Roy Cooper (North Carolina) and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania). All help to reach parts of the electorate she may struggled to connect with.
Party unity, relief at Biden’s departure and the fact that Trump will become the oldest Presidential candidate in history in November, has brought some much-needed cheer to Democrats who have suffered a miserable few weeks. But the true test is only just beginning, and it is going to take the most extraordinary political story in recent years to pass it.

This article was first published by LabourList on July 23rd, 2024

This Thursday, Americans across the country will be enjoying Independence Day with fireworks, barbecues and parties. We can be confident that the festivities will not be punctuated by breaking news from Warrington South, Norwich North or Doncaster Central.

The truth is that the British general election campaign has barely registered in the US at all. There has been little or no reference to it on the mainstream TV news channels. Even in the politically connected circles of Washington DC, it is not a major topic of conversation or interest.

Think tanks have generally ignored it, and politicians have largely been oblivious to it. What commentary there has been in the quality press has tended to focus more on the near-comic theatre of Rishi Sunak’s “Drowning Street” announcement and his D-Day fiasco than any serious analysis of the poll’s impact on the UK’s future or its relationship with the US.

In part, this lack of interest reflects the fact that UK positions on key foreign and security policy issues like Ukraine are unlikely to change very much whoever enters Downing Street on 5th July. Both Conservative and Labour parties are committed to maintaining essential aspects of the transatlantic alliance.

It’s also the case that the key British political personalities have made little or no impact in the US compared to Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s and even, for very different reasons, Boris Johnson.

Rishi Sunak has failed to build generate much of a profile here despite his background as a Stanford alumnus and owner of a £5m penthouse flat in Santa Monica, while Keir Starmer is a virtual unknown having not visited the US at all in the four years he has been leader of the Labour Party.

Of course, British politics (or politics in any other country) is never going to be able to get much of a look-in at a time of wall-to-wall coverage of the impending US Presidential election here, not least in the wake of last week’s televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

As widely reported, the debate was a disaster for Biden who rambled and stuttered his way through this excruciating contest. Often appearing disorientated, he gave the impression of a candidate who might even struggle to last the course of the election campaign never mind another four years in the White House.

The debate has sown panic among many Democrats and created much chatter about the possibility of an “open” convention in Chicago at which the party’s 4,000 delegates would choose a new candidate for President. It looks, however, like they are stuck with the man who will turn 86 before leaving the White House if re-elected for a second term.

The uncomfortable truth
But there is a deeper and more uncomfortable truth that the UK election’s invisibility reflects, and one that sets a significant challenge for a Labour Government. It is that Britain’s influence in Washington is at its lowest it has been for decades, and a Trump White House promises to diminish it further.

The pantomime of British politics over the last decade and the rapid turnover of Tory Prime Ministers has undermined the UK’s reputation as a stable ally here. A combination of Brexit and economic woes have undeniably reduced our status in an American political environment that still loves the Brits for our history and culture but, ultimately, rewards power and impact.

It will be for Keir Starmer to turn this challenge into an opportunity, and securing a sizeable majority on Thursday will win him a rare commodity on the current world stage: a leader with domestic political strength and stability.

Most western leaders in Washington DC next week for the NATO summit are seriously weakened by political events at home. Emmanuel Macron looks set to be forced to share power in France with the far-right, Olaf Scholz’s coalition in Germany is deeply unpopular barely a year before national elections, and Justin Trudeau’s Canadian Liberals are trailing their Conservative opponents by 15 points in national opinion polls.

The summit promises to be Starmer’s first outing on the international stage as Prime Minister. He will use it to reaffirm the UK’s commitment to Ukraine and to begin to build a strong relationship with Joe Biden. There is a lot that connects the current incumbent of the White House to Labour’s leader, not least a shared commitment to using public investment to drive the green transition and industrial growth.

Yet Starmer will be keen to ensure he is well positioned in the event of a Trump election win in November too. David Lammy’s recent visit to Washington DC included meetings with people close to the presumptive Republican nominee, and Starmer himself will want to explore how he can build a productive relationship with him.

There are more than personalities at play here though. It is clear that the primary foreign policy focus of a second Trump Presidency will be on China and not on Russia or Europe. Indeed, some of Trump’s advisers warn that US’s commitments in Europe and the Middle East must be scaled back to strengthen its preparedness for military conflict with the People’s Republic over Taiwan.
​
This has profound implications for the future of the war in Ukraine and for wider European security, and will pose Starmer with fundamental questions about where UK’s strategic interests lie. It also presents an opportunity for him to play a pivotal role in helping shape a shared understanding of where European interests lie too.

This article was first published by LabourList on July 3rd, 2024

It’s now just six months before Americans go to the polls to choose their next President. But predicting the election outcome feels like trying to make sense of Alice’s crazy adventures in Wonderland.

Just as one set of polling data points in one direction, so another comes along telling you directly the opposite – and the constant swirl of anecdotes, commentary and opinion throws up a multitude of conflicting versions of how the next six months will pan out.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy is right to hedge his bets, going beyond Democrat relationships by holding recent meetings with Republicans – and stating he would look for “common cause” with a Donald Trump presidency.

On any rational view of politics, President Biden would be a shoo-in for another four years in the White House. Despite a divided Congress, he’s been able to push through important legislation on infrastructure and investment, extended access to affordable healthcare and reduced the burden of student debt.

The economy is doing very well too with 15 million jobs created over the first three years of his term – more than under any President in US history over the same period – and unemployment has held below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s.

Historically, Americans have tended to give incumbents a second term. Three of the last four Presidents have, in the words of one commentator here, “renewed their vow with the voters”, and – Trump apart – it’s more than three-and-a-half decades since America last chose a one-term Commander-in-Chief.

The fact that his Republican challenger is currently spending more time in US courtrooms than at campaign rallies – facing dozens of criminal charges, any one of which could produce a prison sentence – would, in any normal election, mean this game would already be over. Yet this is not a normal election – or, as Lewis Carroll might have put it, “nothing is because everything isn’t”.

But the President’s poll ratings remain poor to dire. According to a rolling average of opinion polls, Biden trails Trump nationally and is behind by anything from one to seven points in the swing battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

More importantly at this stage of the electoral cycle, fewer than four in ten Americans approve of the way he’s handling the job – the worst score of any first-term president six months out from an election since Dwight Eisenhower, and well below the numbers even Trump himself secured in the middle of the pandemic in 2020.

Biden appears to be winning little public credit for his handling of the economy – Trump retains a clear lead over his Democratic rival on this issue – and concerns about his age (he turns 82 in November) and immigration (about 2.5 million people crossed the southern border in 2023 alone) continue to act as a significant drag on the President’s reelection campaign.

Throw in concern about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the latter of which appears to be testing support among younger and left-leaning voters, and Biden’s position looks precarious.

Yet, far from being panicked by the polls, senior Democrats exude a quiet confidence that the essential elements are in place for Biden to win.

“The President helped steer our country out of the pandemic, has delivered increases in the living standards of most Americans and is the only candidate who will defend democracy and freedom at home and abroad,” said one long-time Biden aide. “For all the chatter and noise, these are the issues that will determine the election.”

For Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and author of the Hopium Chronicles, the party’s electoral gains in the mid-term elections in 2022 and 2023 show that when voters are faced with a real choice they reject extreme MAGA Republicans in key seats. “For years now, Democrats have been winning election after election, and we know that large parts of the population who might have once voted for a Republican candidate will never support Trump. That’s unlikely to change soon given how much more extreme he is now.”

For Rosenberg, as the election draws closer and the campaign properly begins, so voters will tune in more to the issues and turn to Biden. He adds that the Democrats are currently better organised, more unified and are raising a lot more cash than their opponents.

But perhaps the biggest single issue that all Democrats agree has changed the political calculus in their favour is reproductive rights. One described the Supreme Court’s ruling in the spring of 2022 overturning a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion as a political “earthquake”.

“The Republican Party is a very different party from the one that lost in 2020 and they have done two things that will keep them out of power for a long time,” the insider said. “They tried to end democracy on January 6th and then they helped strip the rights and freedoms of more than half the population.”

State referendums on abortion have already been confirmed in three states to coincide with the November Presidential election, and another eight look set to follow. Expect this issue – and the future of American democracy – to be front and centre of the Democrats’ election campaign.

President Biden’s State of the Union speech two months ago was a rehearsal of the big themes of the coming campaign – jobs, freedom, democracy – and his strong performance silenced the doubters on his own side about his fitness to lead a campaign for his return to the White House.

The numbers haven’t changed yet. But six months is enough time for them to do so. It’s also enough time for Trump to face more drama in the courthouse and for Biden to slip up, for more deaths and destruction in Gaza and for a slowdown in the US economy.

Democrats will be hoping to see signs that the polls are turning by their summer convention in Chicago in August. But, with so many variables, it’s anyone’s guess how all this will play out. As Alice said: “It would be nice if something made sense for a change.”

This article was first published by LabourList in May 2024
​

A Trump victory in November will not only pose a serious threat to a newly-elected Labour government’s ambitions on foreign policy, trade and climate change. It will also embolden the populist right internationally, not least in the UK itself.

It’s certainly not inconceivable that Keir Starmer as Prime Minister could find himself in the difficult position of having to maintain diplomatic relations with Donald Trump in Washington at the same time as being challenged by a Conservative Party opposition at home led by the Republican President’s friend and ally, Nigel Farage.

US conservatives are intensely preparing for a second Trump termSo, how bad will a Trump Presidency be? After all, for all the noise and drama, America survived his first administration, and while the institutions of government came under threat, not least from the storming of the Capitol building on January 6th, they just about held up. Perhaps a more telling answer is that provided by many of Trump’s allies and political supporters.

For most of America’s leading conservatives, the first Trump term was a missed opportunity to reshape their country. For them, the lack of preparation, administrative chaos and policy incoherence blunted its impact and allowed the federal government machine – the famed “deep state” – to resist and repel radical change. It’s a mistake they are determined to avoid a second time around.

So, for more than two years, The Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank established in the 1970s, has been leading work to unite the conservative movement behind a programme of action for a future Trump administration to implement from the moment he is inaugurated at 12 noon on January 20th next year.
Led by aides of the former President when last in office, the Foundation’s ‘Project 2025‘ has brought together hundreds of right-wing academics, policy specialists and political strategists to work on a plan for a Republican White House covering every area of policy and operations.

And it is backed by more than 100 organisations – from Christian nationalists to economic liberals, anti-immigration groups to pro-life campaigners – who have come together to support, in the words of Heritage’s founder, Edwin J Feulner, “a mandate to significantly advance conservative principles”.
The result is an extraordinary document called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Running to almost 900 pages, this is not a vague manifesto or statement of general principles. Nor is it a secret effort to obscure the true intentions of what we can expect if Trump wins in November.

‘Project 2025’ outlines radical change to the way the US is governedPublished last year and freely available to those with the stomach to digest it, it is a detailed blueprint for power with a clear and stated aim to reverse “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions” and to “restore our Republic to its original moorings”.

It promises sweeping change of the federal government “behemoth”, which it says has been “weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before”. In doing so, it takes aim at a range of threats it claims threaten America’s future and constitution – from transgender rights to action against climate change, from woke education to globalisation, from Big Tech and large corporations to illegal immigration.

Two clear and defined enemies – China and the American elites “who have betrayed the American people” – lurk behind these growing threats, according to Project 2025, and the coming election is the last chance to change fundamentally the way the US is governed to defeat them.

“The solution to all of the above problems,” it says, “is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees – root and branch.”

To do so needs more than radical policies though, and Project 2025 are embarked on a deliberate effort to recruit sufficient numbers of conservative activists willing and able to take up positions in the Trump administration to drive through this cultural revolution. You can even submit your CV via its website, and the best applicants will be trained and vetted for the vital task ahead.

Presidents normally get to make up to 4,000 political appointments to government positions on entering office. But Trump, if elected, appears determined to go much further to ensure the federal system bends to his will.

By restoring an executive order known as Schedule F, signed two weeks before the 2020 election and subsequently rescinded by President Biden, tens of thousands of career civil servants across a range of departments and agencies could be purged and replaced with “America First” loyalists.

America’s conservatives are intent on breaking the system for good, and they are organising to do so. They are not willing to countenance another Republican failure, as they see it, and are unapologetic that a second Trump Presidency will undoubtedly have far-reaching consequences for America and the world.

Democrats are, of course, hoping that such a radical threat to the system posed by Trump and his MAGA movement will scare floating voters to back the incumbent when the election comes in November, and it’s true that many moderate Republicans will either stay at home or hold their nose and support Biden.

Yet with Trump still ahead in key swing states and public confidence in federal government at an all-time low – only one in six Americans trust it to do the right thing – this is a high-risk electoral strategy.

A lot can and will happen over the next seven months, and while keeping schtum publicly, Labour will be praying the election goes Biden’s way in November. Politics is certainly not going to be pretty in the US before November. But that may be nothing compared to what might follow.

This article was first published by LabourList on April 5, 2024

Liz Truss was at least right about one thing in her embarrassingly obsequious speech to the gathering of the Trumpian vanguard at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held just outside Washington DC last week.

It is that the Western alliance and the values of freedom and democracy that underpin it are under the greatest threat they have faced for more than a generation.

Yet her self-serving 15-minute moan to the MAGA faithful (she blamed the woke left lurking within the British state, corporate boardrooms and Conservative Party for her calamitous, 49-day tenure in Downing Street) was extraordinary in that she failed to mention once the issue that remains the single, greatest demonstration of that threat, namely, the war in Ukraine.

There is a threat to freedom and democracy – the war in UkraineThis omission by a recent British Prime Minister, on the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, was as telling as it was shocking. It represented the conscious appeasement of a dangerous but confident political movement around Donald Trump that is not just ambivalent about Ukraine’s fate but seemingly determined to aid and abet the political and territorial ambitions of Vladimir Putin.

It is more than eight months until the US Presidential elections but Donald Trump is already having a profound effect on this war. His instruction to Republicans in Congress to stall President Biden’s $60 billion funding support for Ukraine is already being felt on the frontline with a shortage of essential weaponry and munitions one factor in explaining recent Russian advances.

​What’s more, Trump sent a chill down the spine of every NATO member when, in a campaign speech earlier this month, he said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any country that fails to meet the alliance’s 2% national spending target on defence.

There is serious concern over financial support for the war effortLittle wonder then that the mood last week among European attendees at the annual Munich Security Conference, which brings together diplomats and security experts from across the globe, was grim.

A “stench of appeasement” hung over the event, according to Federick Kempe, the president of the widely respected US think tank, the Atlantic Council, with “more than a few European leaders making comparisons to September 1938 when a very different Munich meeting placated a murderous dictator—with disastrous consequences.”

There is certainly less talk of Ukraine winning the war and a serious concern that the lack of financial support from the US could tilt the military balance significantly in Russia’s favour in the coming months.

The threat of a 2nd Trump presidency loomsThe fear of what will follow from a reduced US commitment to NATO and European defence as a result of a Trump Presidency next year has felt a lot more real too.

Radek Sikorski, the Foreign Minister of Poland, a country with particular geographical and historical reasons to fear a Moscow regime that makes no secret of its ambitions to restore the power and reach of the Soviet Union, told the Munich conference: “We are at a dramatic moment, one of terrible foreboding.”

This is the potential crisis that may hit Keir Starmer like an express train if and when he takes office in the UK later this year – and one that could shape not just the next Labour government but the future security of Europe too.

If stripped of a reliable American partner and facing an aggressive and unchecked Russian dictator, Europe will have to take on far greater responsibility for its own defence – and the UK, as the continent’s foremost military power, will need to play a leading role.

Replacing US military capacity is an enormous taskReplacing US military capacity would be a huge task and, while European defence spending and industrial production is on the rise, there will need to be a sea-change in attitude and resource if Europe is to achieve the scale and capabilities it would require.

For all his lack of experience in office, particularly in foreign and security affairs, Starmer – newly elected as the head of a stable government and in charge of the UK’s wide range of diplomatic, military and economic assets – could be in a unique position to help steer Europe along this difficult path.

A Labour administration would certainly need significantly to increase spending on defence – an unpopular move for some who would expect a new Labour government to prioritise fixing our crumbling public services – and its promised defence and security review would need to identify those gaps in military capability that require early attention.

Labour is indicating it’s ready to hit the ground runningShadow Defence Secretary John Healey’s speech setting out plans to improve Britain’s military readiness and improve defence procurement arrangements demonstrates a clear sign that, while he cannot make any spending commitments this side of an election, he is ready to hit the ground running on this task.

Whether there is a Trump Presidency or not, a commitment to increasing Europe’s defence capability means that a Labour government also needs urgently to build a new relationship with the European Union and its key members, particularly Germany and France.

While Starmer and his shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy have talked of a new security pact between the UK and EU (first proposed by Theresa May but later dropped by Boris Johnson), the scale of the challenges ahead will require a much more ambitious approach.

Trump would put more pressure and responsibility on a Labour government“Do you think Keir understands that he may well be the leader of the free world by the end of the year?” was a serious question recently put to me by a leading Democrat strategist pondering the implications of a second Trump Presidency.

It is a mantle that Starmer is unlikely to wish upon himself. But it reflects the desperately challenging current global security environment that a future Labour government will operate in.

Of course, there may still be a way found for Congress to unblock US funding to Ukraine to take the fight to the Russian army this year, and continued US support for NATO and European defence would come with President Biden’s re-election.

​We would be wise not to bank on either though, and the forces that got us here are not going away any time soon. The challenges to the future of the Western alliance are real and current and, while it is an outcome unlikely to be welcomed by Liz Truss or the MAGA faithful at CPAC, it may fall to a Labour Government with a clearer understanding of the importance of Britain’s relationship with Europe, the US and the world to address them.

This article was originally published by LabourList on February 29th, 2024

Among the unlikeliest of the 16,000 basketball fans that filed into the Capital One Arena in Washington DC on a freezing Monday evening last month to cheer on the local Wizards against the Detroit Pistons were a group of seven of Labour’s top parliamentary candidates.

The prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs), all standing in battleground seats from Dover to Glasgow, were over here in the US on a four-day trip to swap notes on winning over swing voters and to hear first-hand from Democrat politicians and officials about the impending Presidential and congressional elections in November.

They are certainly not the first crop of British politicians to seek advice and inspiration on this side of the Atlantic. But the fact that general elections in both countries are set to take place this year, possibly within days of each other, gave this pilgrimage – organised by Progressive Britain and the US-based Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) – a particular edge and purpose.

Some critics think Biden should have confronted the liberal leftYet, ironically, with President Biden trailing Donald Trump – the soon-to-be anointed Republican candidate after primary victories in Iowa and New Hampshire – by up to six points in one recent opinion poll, many Democrats are now asking themselves whether they might have been in a stronger position if they had followed the experience of Labour and Keir Starmer.

While most Democrats are publicly rallying around Biden, some are privately despairing of how, through a combination of poor political strategy and personal misjudgments, he appears to have lost the confidence of a significant number of key swing voters he won in 2020.

Foremost among these mistakes, these critics allege, was the President’s willingness to indulge rather than confront the liberal left of the Democrat Party as represented by former rivals Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Both are kept close, and some of their leading advisers were brought into the administration’s ranks at its outset.

This liberal left grouping remains highly critical of the so-called “neoliberal” policies of previous Democrat administrations under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who are accused of having pursued economic policies that served the interests of Wall Street rather than the wider public.

Trashing your party’s record in office is bad politicsYet, despite serving as Vice President for eight years in the Obama administration, Biden has often appeared to side with the Warren/Sanders worldview. Indeed, only last April, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made a keynote speech that implicitly dumped on the economic philosophy of previous Democratic Presidents.

Trashing your party’s record in office is bad politics as Ed Miliband discovered in 2015, and PPI’s president Will Marshall agrees. “Is it really necessary to debate progressives again over Bill Clinton’s legacy?” he wrote last month. “With a vengeful Donald Trump thrashing about our political waters like a blood-frenzied shark, it seems like a distraction. What’s more, the left’s revisionist history of the Clinton years strikes me as a facile exercise in presentism – reinterpreting the past to score present-day ideological points.”

Biden’s critics argue, that having been elected in 2020 as a bipartisan President (not least winning votes from Republicans and independents who could not stomach another Trump term), he has too often sought to govern in a partisan way driven more by a desire to avoid being attacked from the left than from the right.

“Keir Starmer has shown that when you stand firm with the concerns of real voters and take on the minority interests pursued by the left, you win the public’s trust and confidence,” one centrist Democrat observed recently. “This was a lesson we had to learn through the 80s and 90s but is one that appears now to have been forgotten.”

Biden has not been seen to be addressing voters’ key concernsThis strategic weakness has been compounded by what many see as Biden’s unwillingness or inability to address or connect with voters on the key issues of the day, notably the cost of living and immigration.

High inflation has undoubtedly hurt the administration and, while there have been significant falls in the last months, there are fears that long-term, transformational measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act – which invests more than $600bn into the clean energy transition – come at a time when many swing voters believe that public spending needs to be reined back, not least after the significant increase in government intervention during Covid.

Similar questions are being raised within the Labour leadership about the party’s £28bn green investment commitment. As a keen observer of US politics, Rachel Reeves has seen how Bidenomics has failed to land effectively with the American public since her very public embrace of the President’s economic policies when she was in the US in May last year.
Immigration continues to be a major public concern too, with “encounters” on the US-Mexico border last year numbering 2.5 million – the highest level for more than 20 years. As with higher prices, it’s an issue that a President who prides himself on understanding the concerns of middle America has been oddly detached and absent from.

Biden’s experience shows the challenge ahead for Starmer’s LabourThere’s still nine months to go until the US elections, and the combination of a strong and improving economy and Trump’s legal battles offers hope to Democrats that they can still win a second term with Biden.

But, after four days speaking to Democrats on the Hill and in the state legislature of Virginia, the visiting group of Labour PPCs returned to the UK both with a stark view of the task ahead for the Democrats and a renewed sense of purpose of what is required in the UK.

“Looking at US politics is pretty sobering for anyone tempted to get carried away about Labour’s poll lead,” said Kirsty McNeill, the party’s candidate in Midlothian. “The President’s colossal policy achievements are not translating into political support and our US trip was to help us work out why.

“The main conclusion I’ve drawn is that winning the election means getting to base camp – scaling the mountain of getting sustained support for our ambitious missions is the actual task. Keir’s reminders we should have zero complacency about the ease of either winning or governing in these conditions was brought into sharp relief in DC.”

Like US politics, the basketball match she and colleagues attended turned out to be a close-run thing, or at least it was until the last period when the bottom-of-the-table Pistons edged clear to beat the Wizards 129-117. Let’s hope the Washington incumbents in the White House do better when it comes to the election in November.

This article first appeared in LabourList on February 3rd, 2024

The Labour leadership has warmly embraced “Bidenomics” as the inspiration and proof point for its own economic and industrial plans in the UK. Yet their praise for US policy is not one shared by American voters.

Recent polling here in the US shows that six out of ten people disapprove of the President’s performance and have a deeply pessimistic view about their country’s economic future. When asked if Biden or Donald Trump would be better in charge of the country’s economy, more voters go for Trump.

US voters are pessimistic about the economy – despite its strong performanceThis is grim news for an administration going into an election year and particularly because it appears to fly in the face of independent evidence on the performance of the US economy. Data published in the last few weeks shows the US continuing to grow strongly and well above other G7 countries, real wages are rising and unemployment remains under 4%.

Perhaps most frustrating for the Democrats is that voters appear not to give much credit to the centrepiece of Biden’s economic policy – the huge stimulus package to boost growth and invest in infrastructure and green technologies.

In fact, polling suggests at least a third of American people haven’t even heard of the Inflation Reduction Act or other significant measures introduced by the administration as part of what, without doubt, represents a major change in US economic policy of the previous three decades.

This is the Bidenomics that has won praise and admiration from Labour’s top team and helped to shape the party’s own £28bn green prosperity plan. Keir Starmer used his main conference speech in Liverpool in October to applaud the action being taken in the US to invest in the green transition, while Rachel Reeves’s speech even borrowed Joe Biden’s phrase that growth is created “from the bottom up and the middle out”.

So what does the lack of public support for Biden’s economic policies mean for Labour and its adoption of Bidenomics, and what lessons can Starmer and Reeves learn as they fine-tune their economic plans in advance of the forthcoming election in the UK?

Labour should look for some quick wins to show early impactOne key change has already been made – to phase the £28bn investment over a longer period than originally planned and prioritise early reform of the planning system to prevent bottlenecks in the delivery of major projects. This shift appears to have been a decision taken as a direct result of an analysis of the US experience.

There are certainly concerns in the US that while significant sums of public money have been flowing in the direction of some of the biggest companies in the form of corporate subsidies there has, as yet, been little tangible impact for voters to see.

This will come. But the four-year electoral cycle can exact a cruel penalty on long-term economic decision-making – and Starmer and Reeves could do worse than to think more deliberately about how their plans can include some quick wins to demonstrate early impact.

Effective communication of Labour’s economic plans will also be essential to ensure voters clearly understand the rationale and long-term benefits of the planned public investment. This will be particularly important over the next few months as its plans come under sustained attack from a Tory Party determined to paint Labour as a party not to be trusted with spending public money.

The party must not ignore immediate issues facing householdsBut perhaps the greatest lesson of the Biden experience is the need to ensure that the focus on long-term economic change does not obscure the need to address the immediate issues that families and households face in the here and now.

Public anger over inflation appears to be the overwhelming driver of US opinion on the economy, and voters are simply not yet willing to forgive or to listen to anything else. Even with falling inflation, Biden himself has failed to convince people that he’s the man to trust on the issue.

Unlike the Democrats, Labour has avoided the public blame for inflation over the last two years, and the party’s plans are vital to boost the sluggish British economy. But, whatever happens here in the US over the next few months, we may hear a lot less from Starmer’s team about the winning formula of Bidenomics.


This article first appeared in LabourList on December 22 2023

I'm delighted that I'm now up and running in Washington DC providing communications and political support to business and not-for-profit clients on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as commenting on the big issues facing the US and the UK today.

This is an extraordinary time to be here. The Presidential election is less than 12 months away and it promises to be a pivotal moment, not least in determining the future role America will play in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world.

Whatever the outcome, Americans continue to regard the UK as their country's most important foreign policy partner, according to an opinion poll published this week by Pew Research Center, and the trade, security and cultural links that bind our two countries together remain strong.

But with the UK general election likely next year too, 2024 looks set to be another rollercoaster ride for us all bringing significant political change.

I'll be writing about all of this and more over the next few weeks and months, and I'm delighted to have been asked by friends at LabourList in the UK to provide a monthly commentary on the impact of events here in the US on the Labour Party and British politics more generally.

You can can read my first piece on how Labour needs to plan for a Trump Presidency here.

I also remain closely involved with The Power Test podcast in the UK hosted by Ayesha Hazarika and Sam Freedman. We're soon to complete a successful second series and keen to bring more US policy and political voices and insights into our discussions next year about what a future Labour Government needs to do change Britain for the better.

So, there's lots going on and if I can support you or your organization or if you fancy catching up over a coffee in downtown DC then please do get in touch on here or via my new website here. You can also follow me on Twitter (it will always be Twitter to me!) on @Ed_Owen.​

Look away now if you are of a nervous disposition. With less than one year to go before the US election, opinion polls show Donald Trump ahead in key swing states and well placed to return to power as the next President of the United States.

This has sent jittery Democrats into deep soul-searching about whether Joe Biden, 82 next year, is the best candidate to lead the party – and poses a significant challenge to a future Labour government under Keir Starmer.

Labour Prime Ministers have had to work with Republican Presidents before, of course, despite political and ideological differences. Harold Wilson got on well with Richard Nixon, while Tony Blair’s close relationship with George W Bush was cemented following the Camp David love-in weeks after the latter’s inauguration in 2001.

But Starmer and his team face a diplomatic test of a different order of magnitude in dealing with a potential future President still smarting from his defeat in 2020 and on a personal mission to destroy fundamental elements of long-settled American policy at home and abroad.

Trump’s agenda poses a threat to Labour’s policy programmeMake no mistake, if the first Trump presidency was chaotic, a second would be brutal. He would enter the Oval Office far better prepared than he was in 2016 armed with a plan for government (it’s called Agenda 47 as he would be the US’s 47th President if he wins next year) being pieced together by hand-picked right-wing groups and think-tankers.

Large parts of this plan pose a grave threat to key planks of Labour’s own policy programme. Trump’s threat to US membership of NATO, weakening of support to Ukraine and his ambivalence towards a two-state solution in the Middle East would all significantly challenge key UK foreign policy goals.

And there are big risks elsewhere, too. Greater US protectionism would hamper Labour’s economic and trade objectives, and Trump’s promises to reinvest in fossil fuel exploration and production in the US – and withdraw from international agreements on climate change – would represent a significant set-back to the party’s global environmental ambitions.

Starmer must decide how far he would be willing to engageThe UK’s economic and security ties to the US are too important for any British government to turn away from. But Starmer will soon need to start working out how far he is willing to actively engage with a Trump presidency – both in public and in private – to mitigate the worst impacts of how its policies affect the UK.

Active personal engagement with Trump is not for the faint-hearted though, as Theresa May found out to her cost when she rushed over to DC to greet the then new President soon after his inauguration in 2017. Trump’s unpredictability, foibles and propensity for picking fights all make this a diplomatic task from hell.

And any attempt by Starmer to get close to Trump to defend national interests would also face significant hostility at home from those expecting a Labour administration to take a firm public stand against a man who earlier this month echoed the words of Adolf Hitler in promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

Has Labour’s US engagement been too focused on political allies?Given the chilling and unpredictable political environment, some observers are asking whether Labour’s current engagement with the US political system has, so far, been too focused on the comfort-zone of engagement with political allies in the Democrat administration and party.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy – who was over in Washington with Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey recently – has long-standing Democrat contacts. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves was here in May on a high-profile visit, expressing her admiration for so-called “Bidenomics” of massive public investment in green technologies.

Reeves’s trip illustrated how close the policy relationship between Starmer’s team and the Biden administration has become in the last 18 months. But her support for Biden’s economic policies is not widely shared by the American public. Despite high rates of GDP growth, voters are – according to the polls – deeply pessimistic about their economic position, and Biden’s support, particularly among swing voters, has crumbled as a result.

Labour would do well to widen its engagement in the USMany senior Democrats offer a more optimistic picture of Biden’s prospects next year than the polls and dismiss any suggestion that he could be replaced as the party’s candidate. They insist that, the nearer the election looms, so the choice for the US electorate becomes a clearer one.

Trump may be miles ahead of his rivals to win the Republican nomination. But his growing legal problems are a reminder to voters of the chaos of his first term in the White House. Further falls in inflation coupled with high jobs growth will, Biden’s supporters believe, provide a positive economic story at the election.

Let’s hope they’re right. But Labour would do well to widen its engagement here in the US not just to Republicans on the Hill – but beyond the Washington beltway and to the states with influence and power too. After all, even if Biden does win a second presidential term, there is a good chance that the GOP will control both the Senate and the House of Representatives after November with a significant hold on key policy issues affecting the UK.

Last month, the German Foreign Minister – a leading member of the Green Party – travelled to Austin in Texas to promote her country’s businesses and to meet with state governor Greg Abbott, a Trump ally and fervent supporter of the US oil and gas industry, gun ownership and abortion bans.

​It was a stark reminder that the most effective diplomacy in support of national interest rarely involves engaging with political allies. As he and his team prepare to take up the reins of office in the UK, Starmer would do well not only to hope for the best here in the US but to plan for the worst as well.

This piece was first published as a column for LabourList on November 24 2023