LONDON — A British Cabinet minister said they would not call Donald Trump a “fascist,” after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris used the term to describe her Republican rival.
Amid a bitter transatlantic row between the Trump campaign and Britain’s governing Labour Party, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy on Thursday distanced herself from Harris’ description of the former president.
She said politicians should treat one another with respect whatever their personal disagreements — and made clear she would not use the term about Trump.
“I’m not going to criticise Kamala Harris,” Nandy told Times Radio. “I think that she’s fighting her own campaign and she’s entitled to speak for herself, but I wouldn’t use that language about other politicians.”
“I think over the course of time, both in American politics and here in the U.K., we’ve got into a very base political debate where we’ve had far too much people using negative language towards one another,” Nandy added. “I’ve always believed, whether it’s politicians in my own party doing it or politicians in other parties, that we can fundamentally disagree on matters of policy, but we should treat each other with respect and that is not the sort of language that I would use.”
Nandy, a veteran of the U.K.’s fraught debates over Brexit, said it was her personal view that “you lose the ability to understand one another if you don’t treat each other on a personal level with the utmost respect.”
Harris replied in the affirmative Wednesday when asked if she thought Trump was a fascist during a town hall event. The vice president was agreeing with Trump’s former Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who said of Trump in an interview with the New York Times: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
The British minister’s comments come as the governing U.K. Labour Party tries to hose down a row with the Trump campaign over assistance for Harris’ White House bid.
Trump’s campaign this week filed a legal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Labour of election interference after party aides traveled to the U.S. to campaign on the Democrats’ behalf.
Labour has said anyone making the journey is doing so in a personal capacity and stressed that it is not funding the travel or accommodation of any party staff who are volunteering.
Nandy insisted the row would not damage the “special relationship” between the two nations if Trump is elected in November.
“All of our political parties have always had relationships with our sister parties,” she told Sky News. “That has never constrained us from being able to have good relationships where there is a different political party in power.”
