Most people in Britain, and indeed across Europe, will not have been cheering as Donald Trump was inaugurated as US President in a frozen Washington DC this week. Trump may have won the popular vote in the US but he would not do so here. His brand of bluster, bravado and outright cruelty – promising to break-up families in sweeping deportation raids – may play well to his supportive half of a divided America, but it fails to appeal to the ‘Balancer’ majority of Britons.
With Trump now ensconced in the West Wing signing Executive Orders, there is little we can do here in the UK to influence the policies he is seeking to enact – including to halt the asylum system, end birthright citizenship and declare a national emergency at the southern border. But there remains an important role to play in the UK, continental Europe and further afield in containing the spread of Trumpism and authoritarian populism. A brief look at the inauguration VIP list – including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei and officials from Germany’s far-right AfD – shows how the Trump presidency will embolden populists worldwide, further hardening political and media debate about immigration and asylum.
This comes at a pivotal time in world politics, particularly here in Europe. Anti-immigration populists already hold power in Hungary, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands; French politics is in crisis; and a German election in February is expected to show growing support for the AfD.
Britain, despite rising support for Reform UK in the polls, may be better placed than many of its European neighbours to take a stand against the rising tide of populism. While more divided than any of us would like, our society is less polarised than that of the US or many other countries in Europe. Britain has a strong civil society, a stable centre-left government with a large majority (albeit one declining in popularity) and the international status to offer leadership at a global level.
And in the UK, as in many other European countries, the divides that populists exploit are much more narrowly defined than in the US, where issues like gun control and abortion are also dividing lines. What we do share with America, however, is the issue of immigration being weaponised by populists seeking power.
Immigration was the number one issue among US voters who chose Trump over Kamala Harris as their president. On this issue, says Frank Sharry, who was the Kamala Harris campaign’s lead advisor on immigration policy, “The Biden-Harris Administration got this horribly wrong. They mostly avoided issues of migration and border security in hopes of diminishing its salience. This paved the way for Trump and Republicans to brand Democrats as the party of ‘open borders’.”
There are lessons for the UK and across Europe from the Democrats’ failures on immigration in office and during the campaign – and some lessons from their successes too. Towards the end of the Biden administration, says Sharry, they had found a workable policy to bring irregular border crossings under control, below the level during Trump’s first term. The problem was that this policy success came too late, and the Democrats’ silence had allowed Team Trump to set the narrative. When the Biden Administration finally did talk about it, voters simply didn’t believe them – or asked why they hadn’t done it sooner.
Governments have to get the policy and governance right on immigration, as well as the politics and comms, says Sharry. They need to make it work, and make sure voters know about it. That may come as good news to a Starmer government that likes to seek technocratic, rather than political, solutions to problems. A flurry of policy announcements and diplomatic deals, aimed at cracking down on smuggling gangs and facilitating removals of people whose asylum claims have failed, shows the new government is serious about finding policy responses to the small boats issue. Whether these are sufficient will be seen later this year as conditions in the Channel improve, which could see crossings increasing again. If they do, Labour has four years to find and implement policies that do work, before they face the electorate.
British Future is working with Frank Sharry on a new trans-national learning exchange, seeking to understand the lessons from America and what they mean for the politics and policy of immigration here in the UK and across Europe. From what we have seen so far on Day One of Trump’s second presidential term, the next four years will offer much evidence of what happens when those lessons are not heeded, and populists seize power.
