The Democrats walked into a deathtrap. Will Labour take note?

It’s easy enough to sum up the prospects of the next four years in one word: bad. It also won’t be entirely incorrect. But it would also be relatively useless. The re-election of Donald Trump will have different consequences in different arenas, with different implications for different communities - including for us in the UK. These need to be analysed, if possible, predicted, and planned for. Spending the next four years with our heads in our hands will help no one.

First, the consequences. The worst, most dramatic impact will be felt in America itself. The next four years will be a horrible, lethal time to be a woman in the US. If Harris held out the promise of restoring a federal right to abortion in a more robust form than Roe v Wade, Trump’s new administration will, at the very least, let states eviscerate these rights so thoroughly no federal abortion ban will needed. American women are already dying due to routine pregnancy complications in states that instituted local abortion bans; these numbers are likely to increase exponentially. We are also likely to see the cultural normalisation of misogyny and the minimisation of sexual harassment and worse; and it is quite likely that other hard-won rights for women and for LGBTQ people - especially trans people - will be rolled back, too. Expect a rise in transphobic and homophobic violence. Outside the freedom to bully and harass, freedom of speech will suffer as well, with clampdowns on media Trump finds disagreeable, from entire networks to individual journalists. Book bans will grow and probably spread from schools to university campuses. Freedom of assembly and protest will shrink. And this administration might reset the very foundations of how America sees the culturally and economically vital process of immigration. This could rapidly infect the rest of the Western world too, and, judging from recent rhetoric about people smugglers and terrorism, this Labour government seems regrettably and dangerously susceptible.

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Internationally, the consequences are more of a mixed bag. Trump’s isolationism is deeply held, and he will likely move quickly and aggressively to wind down conflicts involving American arms and allies. He will probably pressure Ukraine to reach a humiliating, damaging and far from sustainable ceasefire with Russia, ceding the already occupied and ethnically cleansed territories to the Kremlin. Ukraine’s determined resistance, with US and European support, has hopefully sapped Putin’s enthusiasm for further expansionist wars, but how long it’ll be before he tries and recapture more of the old Eastern Bloc is anyone’s guess; Europe now needs to become more self-reliant than at any point since World War Two, even if Trump does not withdraw from NATO.

In the Middle East, Trump will likely agree, at minimum, to Israeli annexation of the already almost entirely ethnically cleansed northern Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank - or even the entirety of it - and he is likely to turn a blind eye to any mass atrocities perpetrated by Israel in the process. The only slight glimmer of hope there is that being transactional as well as isolationist, Trump is less likely than the Biden administration to be dragged into a direct war with Iran. He may well, in fact, attempt to strike a new deal with the Tehran regime, complete with an end of the war in Lebanon and, quite possibly, a nuclear reactor for Saudi Arabia rolled into the bargain. That fewer people will die in horrific wars - even if for a short while - is not to be shrugged at. Far from it. But that this will be achieved through tearing down postwar norms on wars of aggression, annexation and non-proliferation takes us into both familiar and uncharted territory.

So where does this all leave the UK? It leaves us as the largest country with a liberal social-democratic government in the Western World, with the potential to lead forcefully on combatting climate change and championing robust, urgent climate adaptation - albeit with considerable headwinds from our now fickle and suspicious greatest ally. It leaves us in need of closer partnerships than ever before with Europe, militarily, economically and diplomatically, veneration of Brexit notwithstanding. And it leaves Keir Starmer in the unenviable position of trying to negotiate a working relationship with a prickly, ideologically antagonistic and insular Trump, while also emerging as the champion of social democracy as a viable, fighting alternative to Trumpism.

The latter is going to be of far greater consequence to Britain and to Labour than, say, Trump complaining about Labour’s “election interference” in the closing days of the campaign (primarily a jab at Democrats and their own election interference narratives; Labour was not remotely the protagonist.) True, the Harris campaign fought against overpowering headwinds, not least among them misogyny and racism. But arguably, the single greatest unforced error of both the tenure and the campaigning by Biden and Harris was digging in on the “objective” indicators of America’s economic recovery and dismissing many Americans “subjective” feeling that the economy is only getting worse; and neglecting to make good on the moderate-progressive, Biden-Sanders coalition that has been essential in ensuring Trump’s defeat in 2020.

It’s all too easy to imagine the following scenario: new tariffs stateside halve Britain’s growth; Rachel Reeves remains fixated on fiscal indicators instead of on tangible, perceptible improvements to the cost of living; and Starmer remains stuck on the 2024 campaign goal of proving technocratic competence instead of attuning to the anger that will be steadily building up toward 2029. In comes someone who can ride that anger unabashedly - Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage, or someone very much like them. If we’re lucky a more populist alternative from the Left will emerge too, but these don’t tend to fare as constructively in the UK as elsewhere.

At the end of the day, elections are about stories as well as about spreadsheets. Trump, aided by a nasty gambler’s fortune, told a story that tallied better with the spreadsheets on people’s phones, even if it didn’t with the ones on economists laptops. Labour - and the Democrats - now have about four years to write new spreadsheets and new stories. Let’s hope they use this time well.

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