UK press are normalising Trump’s crackdown on civil rights
Opinion
Britain’s right-wing press are offering uncritical support for Trump’s immigration policies, even as they infringe on civil liberties and the rule of law. It begs the question: are the Sun, Times, Mail and Express moving to back Reform?
President Donald Trump may have been in the UK on a private visit, primarily to promote his two Scottish golf courses, but the scale of interference in the politics of another country has still been wondrous to behold.
Trump has the “simple” solutions to all the UK’s problems, up to and including showing Prime Minister Keir Starmer how to see off Nigel Farage.
The leader of Reform Ltd, who wasn’t even invited to Scotland, might have been more than miffed at such a stance, given that he once rushed to the US to be with his hero after the “assassination” attempt.
Trump’s advice to Sir Keir was comprehensive. As the Daily Express front page summed it up, all the PM has to do is lower taxes, stop crime, cut illegal migration and protect farmers.
The Times delightfully also went into much greater detail into how Trump compared the two politicians: in a massive understatement, Trump admitted he didn’t know about politics in the UK.
“I don’t know where they (Starmer and Farage) stand. I would say one is slightly liberal — not that liberal, slightly,” said Trump.
Many in the Labour Party might agree with that assessment.
“And the other one is slightly Conservative but they are both good men,” said the American President, betraying the full shallowness of his knowledge.
There were attacks on the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan and extraordinary praise for the Prime Minister’s wife Victoria, who he said “was a respected person all over the US.”
Pardon? She’s hardly known in the UK, never mind the US, mainly because she choses to have as private a life as possible, working in occupational therapy for the NHS, an organisation that neither Trump nor Farage much admires.
And talking about pardons, Trump noted he would be allowed to grant convicted child trafficker Ghislane Maxwell a pardon, “but nobody has approached me with it.”
Perhaps.
Uncritical thinking
The point about this near farrago of nonsense from Trump is that, in general, it was all lapped up, largely uncritically, by the UK’s right-wing press, as near gospel.
There was little sign of context or examination of the source from whence it all came.
For the Daily Express, Trump was right to “stick it to Sir Keir”; the American president was absolutely justified in telling the UK Prime Minister that if he was to have any chance of beating Farage he would have to cut taxes, slash illegal immigration and protect farms.
The Daily Mail, unsurprisingly, also thought the President made perfect sense.
“But as a socialist, open-borders fanatic, will Sir Keir listen? We won’t hold our breath,” the paper concluded.
There are just a few problems with Trump’s position.
His harsh, and possibly illegal, immigration policies are destroying large sections of American agriculture because those who historically picked fruit and vegetables are no longer there to do so.
Trump lecturing the UK on crime seems even more odd.
The homicide rate in the US is around six a year per 100,000 of population.
The latest figures for England and Wales show 9.9 murders per million population.
As for the economy and inflation Trump is in the process of destroying the healthy, growing economy he inherited from President Biden.
His ridiculous system of tariffs is fuelling American inflation while Trump continues to insist, falsely, that the price of everything is coming down.
Apologia for the indefensible
As he threw rocks in all directions, Trump’s Turnberry golf course was the ultimate glasshouse — but the right-wing British press neither noticed nor cared.
Yet there is something more significant going on in large sections of the British press. It is the increasing normalisation of Trump and his lesser British acolyte, Farage.
Some are starting to wonder whether sections of the Conservative Party’s most loyal media supporters are starting to lay the ground for a future segway to supporting Reform.
On Saturday, presumably by coincidence, there were two articles in two very different newspapers — The Sun and The Times — that appeared to normalise one of Trump’s most extreme policies: his approach to immigration.
In The Sun, Harry Cole compared the British and the American way of dealing with immigrants — essentially, Four-Star Hotels versus “Alligator Alcatraz”.
By implication, while the US Government’s methods “are not for the squeamish”, they are just about OK because they have been effective.
Compare the cages of “Alligator Alcatraz” with the way that “soft-touch” Britain pampers those in the asylum queue.
Starmer is also attacked for ending the Rwanda scheme, which sent a couple of migrants there at a cost of £700m.
For Cole, the Prime Minister “could learn a thing or two from the President, if he is serious.”
One hopes the Sun’s “editor at large” is not talking about dividing families or people who have lived in America for decades being picked up in the street by masked ICE agents and denied any form of law or due process.
If Starmer were to get tough, according to Cole, the Labour Party would scream, the BBC would froth and lefty lawyers and activist charity campaigners would create a wall of noise.
“British voters would only thank him (Starmer) for creating an actual wall once again around our country,” Cole argues.
Tory press no more?
In The Times, the former editor of The Spectator Fraser Nelson admired how tough tactics on the Mexico border have almost halted the stream of migrants and that Trump can show Starmer how to stop the boats.
Nelson does however believe Trump has gone too far in sending ICE agents to war against people who have lived peacefully in the US for years.
But Nelson is a big fan of the Rwanda scheme, found illegal by the UK Supreme Court.
The Times columnist suggests Starmer could cut a deal to send every small boat arrival to Rwanda or Kosovo and there they would have to remain even if their claims were subsequently upheld.
All hail the return of master political puppeteer Rupert Murdoch
If Starmer fails to fix the failed asylum system the electorate “may soon conclude that only Reform is serious about solving the problem.”
Clearly both Trump and Farage are making great inroads into being acceptable to sections of the mainstream press.
It is a press that seems happy to accept uncritically, uncosted, impractical policies that, as many have pointed out, appear to have been drawn up on the back of a fag packet.
Is it the first sign of the Tory press being the Tory press no more, but following the opinion polls and gradually sliding downhill in the direction of Reform?
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.