Starmer is kidding himself about the special relationship

After that, the if and buts begin to pile up. 

You cannot reset the relationship with the EU by insisting on the same red lines as Theresa May. There is almost nothing that can be achieved when the UK insists, as the PM did again last night, that we will never move an inch on freedom of movement, the Single Market, and the Customs Union. 

Also, Trump is different, and times have changed. To claim as Sir Keir did that “Our relationship with the United States has been the cornerstone of our security and our prosperity for over a century. And we will never turn away from that. We call it the special relationship for a reason”, is not as he claims realism. It is fantasy. 

Trump does not care a jot for the so-called “special relationship” nor did any recent American president that I can think of. The idea that we must still cling to idea that we are “special” when Trump may abandon us at the first chance he gets is pathetic. 

To do so by invoking the blood shed together in Flanders and Normandy by British and American troops is rose-tinted nostalgia of the most worrying kind.  Not least because Trump thinks his country’s war dead were “suckers and losers”.

If Sir Keir thinks invoking the ghosts of Clement Atlee and Churchill is going to convince an intelligent audience that he is a giant like them he is wrong. He claims that they backed neither Europe nor America but both. Well, no they didn’t really – they backed America and as a result the UK turned its back on Europe, thinking it could go it alone with its “special relationship”. 

The worst bit of the speech by far was the claim by the PM that “this is not about sentimentality. It is about hard-headed realism. Time and again the best hope for the world and the surest way to serve our mutual national interest has come from our two nations working together. It still does.” 

I am sorry, but that statement is the most sentimental pile of mushy, sickly sweet romantic self-deception I have heard in a long time. It is not in any way, shape, or form “hard-headed realism”.

It is a rather an inadequate, desperately sad and demeaning attempt to plead for the special relationship, with a president who does not give a damn for it, for us or for anyone else. 

If the British government really thinks that the UK and the USA working ever closer together is the “best hope for the world” than I really worry for its sanity.

The world has moved on and left us behind. We have crippled ourselves with Brexit and cannot catch up while we are out of the EU.

Meanwhile America has finally abandoned the post-war international order in an act of immense self-harm and our old assumptions about our place in the world can now no longer be relied on. 

What we desperately need is a leader who will stand up and say those things. Say that the special relationship is dead, that it died a long time ago, that if even if it wasn’t quite dead by 2016 Brexit finished it off with a brutal coup de grace, and that we are fooling ourselves if we think it still exists or can in any way be relied on, let alone be the cornerstone of our foreign policy. 

No prime minister has the courage to say that, maybe they still believe that we still have the heft we did under Atlee or Churchill, but I doubt it. 

But they do know their careers would be unlikely to survive admitting the truth, the UK is living in a Walter Mitty dream, and we are too terrified to ever see the real world as it is.  

One day we will have wake up and choose, between an isolationist superpower that doesn’t care for us or want us and one that we stabbed in the back, deserted, undermined, and shunned. 

That is the real world. That is Global Brexit Britain’s world.