Much as I admire campaigners for the rights of their own community, I always retain a degree of caution. Only when I see them also campaign for the rights of other communities can I safely place my trust in them. The best racial justice campaigners are also excellent campaigners for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. And vice versa. The same is true of environmental campaigners and workers’ rights champions. Until we see the connections between our own struggle and the struggle of others, we risk falling short in our understanding, thus weakening the morality of any cause that we champion.
Similarly, I have respect for those who express radical ideas and support important causes during the times when they are popular or are growing in strength. Yet I have massively more respect for those who stand out against the times or dare to reject false beliefs that are circulating widely in their own community. Few things are more admirable than a person who stands firm and refuses to compromise when the majority of those around them are giving themselves over to dangerous ideas or cruel actions.
Lessons from the Holocaust
The recent 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is a salutary lesson for all of us about what happens when quite ordinary people allow themselves to be taken along with the flow. It is all too easy to remain silent whilst a few rights are removed from a set of people who don’t appear to be entirely like you and then get used to being indifferent as the demonisation of that community gathers strength. Before long, you find yourself complicit as Jewish people, members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people and political dissidents disappear into camps where they face forced labour or industrial slaughter.
People like Oskar Schindler who put themselves at personal risk to keep others from being sent to the gas chambers are justifiably the subject of great respect. What made his work particularly admirable was that he had no vested interest in saving members of the Jewish community. He acted because it was the right thing to do, and his behaviour was a sharp contrast with the silence and complicity of an entire generation of his fellow citizens in the face of great evil.
Standing up to dictators
Similarly, the proud Russian nationalist, Alexei Navalny, gained much deserved respect for standing firm against Vladimir Putin’s regime in the teeth of every attempt to intimidate him via poisoning or increasingly harsh imprisonment of himself, his friends, his family and his lawyers. It was, however, only when he switched to also campaigning against the invasion of Ukraine and stood out against a bad war conducted by his own nation that he truly transformed himself into a great leader.
Such stances aren’t always so grand. It is easy to stay silent in a social situation when someone comes out with polite middle-class racism or sexism. Finding an effective way to voice a different opinion makes a real impact. It was the people who challenged the assumptions made by those who were closest to them who most successfully pushed forward the massive improvements in women’s rights and in gay rights that have taken place in my lifetime.
Britain’s leaders are failing the Trump test
It is in this context that we need to judge the actions of our current generation of political leaders now that Donald Trump has gained power in the United States. It isn’t possible to compromise with what is happening and not be complicit in it. When great evil is abroad, someone’s character is defined by whether they recognise it for what it is and stand firm against it or whether they bend with the wind and try and accommodate actions and beliefs that they know in their heart are quite wrong. Resistance becomes more important than politeness.
All too many of our leaders are failing that test. The contrast between the honest truths that many of them spoke before the re-election of Trump and the toadying sycophantic supplications that are coming out of their mouths right now is shameful in the extreme.
The person that Keir Starmer chose to be the British ambassador to the United States is Peter Mandelson. He once described Trump as a dangerous fanatic and a white supremacist. Now he has gone on prime-time television in the US to tell people that he was quite wrong and everyone thinks Trump’s energy is admirable. The vast majority of people in Britain deeply distrust and dislike the arrogance, the lies, and the bullying behaviour of the current US president.
Starmer’s choice of ambassador has just told millions of people in America that he is widely admired. At a time when Trump has bullied Columbia and is actively trying to bully Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, Denmark, and the EU, was that the right behaviour for the representative of a proud sovereign nation like Britain to adopt? Peter Mandelson was not alone. David Lammy our foreign secretary made a similarly shameful climbdown and the string of people who have queued up to express their regret at supposedly misjudging Trump has become so shameful that Private Eye ran an entire front page exposing the ludicrousness of the hypocrisy.
Trump will not back down
Does anyone think that Trump is in the business of forgiving and forgetting? Does it really help our nation to be seen to be weak and willing to compromise quite so easily at a time when we are entering a dangerous trade war? There is a time for realpolitik and for deciding that caution is the better part of valour. This is not it. Hoping that Trump will moderate his position and be nice to our nation if our leaders try and butter him up with offers of tea with the Royals is not the way to handle the scale of the danger that he represents.
This is a time for international solidarity against a serious threat. Comfortable notions that Britain has a special relationship with a reliable ally are simply wrongheaded. We are dealing with a man who is entirely driven by self-interest. He is taking his nation down a dark hole of casual racism, routine misogyny, and determined pursuit of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of those less fortunate.
Our leaders cannot casually brush that aside and pretend that he doesn’t mean what he says whilst they allow other countries to be picked off, isolated, and then bullied into compliance. It is naïve in the extreme to think that Britain will not find itself in the firing line in the future. Playing nice towards those who are at his mercy isn’t the way Trump works. Once he has weakened one enemy, he will turn on the next target and we risk finding our country friendless if our leaders refuse to stand alongside the early victims.
The judgement of history
When the history of this bleak period is written, our leaders will not be judged by how skilfully they managed to compromise and go part of the way along the dark direction that Trump and his allies are heading. They will be judged by how strongly they stood out against the coming storms. Literally, given Trump’s determination to drill baby drill.
Can you honestly say that you are impressed by the stance of Britain’s leaders so far? Or that you are hopeful that their efforts to cosy up to Trump are going to prove fruitful?
Trump is enjoying the smell of our weakness. We need to show strength.
