BRITISH LIBERALS DON´T LIKE DONALD TRUMP

Source Politico BY NOAH KEATE

LONDON — Almost every major British political party has bent the knee to Donald Trump. The Liberal Democrats are happy to stay standing.

While Prime Minister Keir Starmer is busy trying to build a bridge between Washington and Europe amid a major transatlantic rift, the centrist Liberal Democrats are carving out a niche in the House of Commons by stridently criticizing the MAGA president.

The Lib Dems are the third-largest force in a House of Commons still dominated by Labour and the Conservatives, and won’t have to deal with Trump’s administration directly any time soon. It Is smart politics as the Lib Dems bank on a British distaste for Trump that seems to transcend party lines.

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, buoyed by their best-ever result, told POLITICO Trump is an “incredibly dangerous” president, even as he stressed that the “bonds of friendship between Europe and the USA go far deeper than one president or one administration.”

Davey hasn’t exactly held back since his preferred U.S. presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, lost to Trump on what the Lib Dem chief called a “dark” day for the West. He has insisted Trump should only receive the pomp and ceremony of a British state visit if he supports Ukraine. He’s argued that Britain should use the threat of Trump’s tariffs to negotiate membership of the EU customs union — a long-standing rallying cry of the anti-Brexit Lib Dems.

And at prime minister’s questions, the most visible House of Commons moment of the British political week, Davey often uses his allocated slot to try to drive a wedge between Trump and the Labour government.

“Trump is a different type of American leader,” argued the party’s foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller in an interview. “What we are calling for is a higher level of realism about the kind of president we’re now working with.” 

Trump’s decisions “are unpredictable and … he is an unreliable partner,” Miller added.

“We were very clear that those represent a threat to the world and to the Recent Ipsos polling found 63 percent of Britons had an unfavorable view of the U.S. president — with just 22 percent having a favorable view. 

Voters “are open to people being more critical of some of the ways that he does politics and some of the things he does” without being “knee-jerk,” said former Lib Dem adviser Sean Kempfor Politico. 

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s small but significant band of Reform UK MPs backs the president more openly, with Farage pitching himself as a key Trump whisperer on this side of the Atlantic.

But the Lib Dems are unburdened by the need for such diplomatic niceties — and so can forcefully attack him while trying to appeal to that broad pool of Brits who find him distasteful.

“There are folk who will have supported Liberal Democrats over many years, but also people from other parties who are uncomfortable with the specter of a Trump presidency,” argued Miller — who insisted the party’s stance isn’t for electoral reasons. 

The Lib Dems also hope to tie opposition to Trump to the need for closer EU links in an uncertain world. Davey marked five years since Brexit by pointedly saying the U.K. “needs to lead in Europe.”

He told LBC a close relationship was “a good way of showing to President Trump that we’re a bit tougher than he thinks.”  “It’s allowed them to bring up the EU in a way that makes it not just sound like they just still can’t let the referendum go,” Kemp said.

“Having a broad philosophy which is liberal in opposition to the values which the MAGA movement has in America … would seem to be very much in our long-term strategic interest,” Cable said.  “This is the serious approach, and it is one that’s grounded in realpolitik,” Miller said of the Lib Dem strategy — calling it “muscular liberalism.”