ON THE PRIME MINISTER’S PLANE TO BAKU — Keir Starmer insisted Britain doesn’t have to choose between friendship with the EU or the United States — despite the re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. president last week.
Speaking as he travelled to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, the British prime minister downplayed suggestions that the U.K. could end up caught in the middle of an EU-U.S. trade war — and declined to start talking up British carve-outs from Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on American imports.
“I want good relations with all of our allies, that’s really important — whether that’s the EU or the U.S.,” Britain’s newly-elected center-left leader said.
“Obviously European countries are our nearest trading partners and we have got a long shared history,” he added, pointing to two world wars. “But equally the special relationship with the U.S. was forged in difficult circumstances, it’s hugely important to the U.K. I want to ensure we’ve got good relations with all of our important allies, and that includes the EU and the U.S.”
Trump has vowed to bring back jobs to the United States, and argues he can do so by imposing across-the-board duties of up to 20 percent on American imports. Economists have warned that the plan would hit U.K. exporters hard, even as British ministers insist they are “extremely well prepared” for such an outcome.
The EU is meanwhile braced to strike back hard at Trump tariffs.
Pressed on how confident he is that the U.K. could win carve-outs from Trump’s plan — or whether retaliatory tariffs are on the cards — Starmer declined to answer.
“I’m not going to get into a hypothetical discussion about policies before we actually get to those policies,” the British prime minister said. “So we’ll come back to it when we see what they actually are.”
Trump ties ‘positive and constructive’
The British government has been keen to talk up its ability to do business with Trump despite a host of highly-charged comments by Labour politicians before the party took office in July.
Starmer, a strait-laced former prosecutor, also makes for a stark contrast to the freewheeling Republican firebrand. Yet the pair enjoyed a two-hour dinner at Trump Tower in New York in September, and Starmer told reporters Monday that he is a “big believer in face-to-face engagement.”
“I think he intended when we met in New York to ensure that we can create a good relationship going forward,” said the British prime minister. “That’s the right thing to do.”
