Let me be blunt. Donald Trump wants to pull America out of NATO. And my honest reaction? Let him.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying we need to stop acting like heartbroken teenagers waiting for Washington to text back. The special relationship is dead. It’s been dead for a while. Trump just had the decency to say it out loud.
So what now? We do what Britain has always done when its back is against the wall. We get serious. We get moving. And we stop relying on people who have made it crystal clear they don’t care whether we sink or swim.
Britain needs to re-industrialise, and I mean urgently not as some vague manifesto pledge buried on page forty-seven, but as a national mission. We need to open arms factories. We need to build capacity to manufacture what we need to defend ourselves and our allies, on our own soil, with our own workers. If we cannot produce the steel, the ships, the ammunition, and the technology to keep this country safe, then we are not a sovereign nation. We are a theme park with a nuclear deterrent.
And yes, I said steel. We need a nationalised steel sector. I know that makes some in our party uncomfortable. Good. Comfort is what got us here. Thirty years of comfortable orthodoxy, comfortable assumptions about the end of history, comfortable faith that the Americans would always be there and the markets would always provide. The peace dividend has been spent. Every last penny. It’s time to invest again, and if the private sector won’t do it, then the state must.
Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room or rather, the elephant that was wheeled out of the room in 2016. Brexit. We are still losing roughly one hundred billion pounds a year from our economy because of a decision sold to the British people on lies, funded by dark money, and championed by people who now sit in the House of Lords pretending it was all a great success. It wasn’t. It was a catastrophe. And the same voices that told you Brussels was the enemy were carrying water for Moscow the entire time.
The Russian sympathisers didn’t just poison Salisbury. They poisoned our politics. They poured money into the campaign to rip us out of Europe because a fragmented, isolated Britain serves Putin’s interests perfectly. A Britain cut off from its neighbours, cut off from collective security, cut off from the largest single market on earth that’s not sovereignty. That’s exactly what our adversaries wanted.
As Liberal Democrats, we should be saying this loudly and without embarrassment. Get back in with the EU. Rebuild that relationship, not out of nostalgia but out of cold, hard, strategic necessity. And build CANZUK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom) into something real and meaningful. Not a flag-waving exercise, but a genuine network of democratic allies who trade together, defend together, and stand together when the authoritarians come knocking.
Because make no mistake they are knocking. Trump is not our friend. Putin is our enemy. And the line between the two gets blurrier by the day. One destabilises the West from inside. The other destabilises it from outside. Both benefit when democracies are weak, divided, and afraid.
I refuse to be afraid. And I refuse to accept that Britain’s best days require an American permission slip. This country built the modern world. We abolished the slave trade, created the welfare state, and stood alone against fascism when no one else would. We can do hard things. We’ve always done hard things.
But only when we choose to. Only when we stop waiting for someone else to save us and start saving ourselves.
So here’s my message to the party and to the country: let’s get moving. Re-industrialise. Rebuild our alliances. Reinvest in defence. Reconnect with Europe. And let anyone in Washington, in Moscow, or in Westminster who stands in the way of Britain’s renewal know exactly where they stand with us.
Nowhere!
* Mo Waqas is a vice chair of the Liberal Democrats' Racial Diversity Campaign and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Why Kenneth Williams wanted to be serviced by Terence Rattigan
National politicians should keep their noses out of the decision-making processes of local councillors
A medieval street at the heart of Swansea's social life
David Allen
Simon Mcgrath
cassie
Jana
Andrew Ducker
17 Comments
Brilliant. I switched from voting Tory to Alliance/Liberal Democrat in 1983 and agree with all the strategies set. Many years ago I was appointed Barclays Bank’s first group strategic planning manager.
I read this with some concern. For example, “ Russian sympathisers…..poured money into the campaign to rip us out of Europe…”
This seems to be casting doubt on the result of the Brexit vote on the basis of what amounts to a conspiracy theory – that it was down to Russian interference to swing the vote.
So, please provide some evidence to support the idea that ‘Russian sympathisers’ were responsible for ‘pouring’ money into the Leave side at the referendum. Otherwise, you undermines the main – and valid – points you make by the use of hyperbole.
Sorry, Mo, but too much hyperbole. I’ve lived through well over a dozen U.S. Presidents (and agree this is the most ignorant and appalling of the lot by a mile)……. But, they come and they go. This one will be gone by 2028 if not sooner.
What matters now is coordinating calm sensible relations with all our NATO partners until this man is gone, and judging by the news and current polling it is far from certain the present incumbent of the White House will still be there in two and a bit years’ time.
“Get your own oil”
OK. If we negotiate with Iran to buy their oil, no doubt they would let us bring it home. They might have some preconditions, like stopping the USA using bases on British soil, but hey, whose fault is it the Strait of Hormuz is closed for Western shipping.
Mo – I like your approach!
Of course, the wishy-washy nit-pickers will now seek to exercise what they see as their superior intellect and rubbish most of what you have said.
But the key thing is for us to acknowledge that we need to have workable strategies now. And if we don’t have them, then they need to be developed right from this moment in time – not after years of head scratching and prevarication. The years of platitudinous waffle must now be replaced by a genuinely effective attitude of ‘hurry up’.
Now!
@Jenny Barnes. Couldn’t agree more. Hopefully the world will reconfigure its supply chains and it’s business relationships, to exclude the USA who are simply unreliable partners while the present regime (and I use that term deliberately) are in charge. Closer links with Canada, Australia and Europe, while hopefully the Gulf States will become less reliant on America after this debacle and will look to countries like France and Britain when they come to rebuild their infrastructure.
Good article, and good comments.
Three points.
First no one is going to build a factory or shipyard to build military equipment unless we are spending at least 5% of GDP on defence, probably higher. In the 1980s UK defence spending peaked at 6% in the ‘60s it was 7%. That is more than double current spending. It’s true we could borrow but in the long run we would have to either tax more or cut spending elsewhere. Almost certainly both.
Second if you want to re-industrialise that means cheaper power which is not possible with renewables; at least at present. How many coal power stations are you willing to reopen? Also ships and armoured fighting vehicles need diesel fuel. So that means Nothing Sea oil and gas.
Third Brexit is still very divisive. If you try to force through rejoining the EU at the same time as tax rises and spending cuts, good luck with that.
I agree that with the benefit of hindsight the peace dividend was too great and we need to re-arm. But that means hard choices so we need a plan to deal with that.
“If we cannot produce the steel, the ships, the ammunition, and the technology to keep this country safe”
This seems to be missing a key point: those ships won’t sail themselves. But the armed forces are consistently failing to recruit enough to even maintain their current much-reduced size.
I think I agree with David Raw’s approach of stay calm and carry on.
We do need a careful rethink of defense policy but the limited effectiveness of ships, military jets and tanks have been shown in both Ukraine and Iran. We are in the age that is dominated by drones and missiles and no doubt AI powered autonomous weapons in the future.
Britain as a consequence of language, culture, history and inter-dependent intelligence sharing across the 5 I’s still retains the ability to serve as a vital security link between Europe and the USA.
Unquestionably, we will need closer integration within a collective European defence structure, but our Geography suggests our most effective role is in policing the high north along with the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. Eastern Europe is best manned by the central and European nations based in the European plain and facing Russia’s border.
Defence spending will need to increase to the 3% to 3.5% level, but that has to be directed to where it is most effective in drone technology, missiles, submarines, minesweepers. troop carriers, satellites and nuclear deterrence. We don’t need to replicate the vast array of battle tanks, artillery and bombers to defend the European mainland that the Central and European powers may provide or carrier groups to project power in the Indo-pacific region.
Mo allows himself to be blunt, and deserves a response in similar terms. He is right about the foolishness of Brexit, but I’m afraid his article also rings some alarm bells. His tone is Jingoistic at times (“we built the modern world”, etc.), but worse is his assumption that Netanyahu, Putin and Trump should be allowed to set the agenda for Europe. We are 500 million people and they are three narcissists, whose paranoid delusions make them want to see a world shaped to look like their own minds – mired in suspicion and hatred, and glorying in acts of violence. The vast majority of us don’t need mutual hatred between us the Russians or Iranians, and they don’t need it either.
It is, however, true that we are in a war, one started inadvertently at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Earth is fighting back, and despite doing so without conscious intent, it’s on course to either destroy civilisation as we know it or wipe out the human race entirely (and many other species).
We don’t need to be building factories to manufacture the weapons of war so we can act out the fantasies of a tiny handful of deluded politicians, we need to learn how to maximise cooperation with our fellow men and women across the globe, whose hopes and dreams for themselves and for their children and grandchildren are the same as ours.
I remember the historian Peter Hennessy telling me in a conversation during the 1990s that the so-called “special relationship” was always exactly what the USA chose it to mean at any time, i.e they could ignore whatever the UK though whenever they chose to do so. I do have a number of USA friends and colleagues, and I know that there are millions of concerned Americans who share the same ethics and have similar views to us in Britain and elsewhere across Europe. Very sadly, they no longer seem to be in a majority in their own country. Donald Trump may be gone in 2028 (or before), but I do not see a return to the relationship which existed before his presidency. We in Europe have to be prepared for a situation in which the US government is little concerned about its relationships with and is more involved with like-minded regimes in more authoritarian countries. Trump was correct in one claim – European countries have been comfortably bathing in the shadow of the USA for decades, and need to look to our own resources, including making secure our own continent’s security and defence.
Anyone looking for guidance and inspiration on this theme would do well to read Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War, specifically volumes 1, 2 and 3. Vol 1 covers the preparation phase where preparations were not address; volumes 2 and 3 describe what it was like to be alone and what Britain eventually did about it.
Notwithstanding, America was critical to success.
I applaud Mo’s passionate call to arms, regardless of the hyperbole which may be unsettling for some. I’m not sure about rebuilding a steel industry in the UK but what is clear is that with a population of 500 million if Europe can work together and share resources it should be able to stand up against the threats from Washington and Moscow. So we need to be bold in our campaign to rejoin the EU as quickly as possible in order to regain our seat at the table, whilst immediately rejoining the customs union and aligning ourselves with the single market to kick start our economy. There is an excellent piece by Naomi Smith at Best for Britain this week on exactly this. Brexit is not ‘toxic’ everywhere, in fact it is the majority view now that it was a catastrophic mistake and that we should rejoin.
@Jamie Dobson
“…volumes 2 and 3 describe what it was like to be alone and what Britain eventually did about it.”
One of the myths about WW2 was that ‘Britain stood alone’. That view of history ignores the fact that Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa all declared war within days of the UK declaring war, and stood with us until the war ended. And of course, the USSR fought the Germans in Eastern Europe for six months before the USA joined the war at the end of 1941. That said, it is true that the UK was the only European country at war with Germany for a 12 month period from June 1940 to June 1941.
@ Jamie Dobson. “Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War”.
I think you’ll find the ordinary people of the UK gave their verdict on Winston Churchill towards the end of WW11 in July, 1945, Jamie, just like the people of Dundee gave their verdict in 1922.
Mo says ” If we cannot produce the steel, the ships, the ammunition, and the technology to keep this country safe, then we are not a sovereign nation.” Benedict Andersen put the “sovereign nation” kind of nationalist ideology where it belongs, with his 1983 book about “imagined communities”.
The human race is only divided into nations because that made sense in historical times. Now we know we all face the same threat from climate change we need to either come together or adopt a ‘devil take the hindmost’ approach, and look after ourselves as best we can.
The pathetic jockeying for position of world leaders like Trump, Netanyahu or Putin barely merits the term ‘adolescent’ in its self-centred ignorance of what is really going on.