Imitation Game

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer raises the stakes with a Trump-style strategy—but experts warn his rightward move could be a dangerous gamble

- by HUGH CAMERON

SIR KEIR STARMER HAS BEEN accused of employing anglicized forms of Trumpian rhetoric and emulating the U.S. president's stances on immigration in an apparent effort to stave off growing electoral threats from the country's truly MAGA-esque forces.

The British prime minister has channeled President Donald Trump in increasingly frequent and obvious ways. Seemingly borrowing from the Trump playbook, he pledged to “cut the weeds of regulation” in a January op-ed for The Times newspaper, reminiscent of the president's 2017 remark that “we're here today for one single reason: to cut the red tape of regulation.”

More recently, Starmer described his approach to the development of nuclear power stations in England and Wales as “build, baby, build,” echoing Trump's vow to “drill, baby, drill.”

In December 2024, he criticized government workers in the U.K. civil service, saying that while there was not a “swamp to be drained here,” too many were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” A union leader for those workers accused him of invoking “Trumpian language.”

But toeing a tougher line on immigration has been at the center of the shift. In May, ahead of his Labour Party publishing a white paper on the issue, the prime minister accused the previous Conservative government of conducting a “one-nation experiment on open borders” and argued that without stricter controls the U.K. risked becoming “an island of strangers.”

Starmer's language drew criticism from members of his own party and was compared to Enoch Powell's 1968 speech “Rivers of Blood”—in which the Conservative MP predicted that immigration and multiculturalism would reduce citizens to “strangers in their own country” and result in the eventual death of British national identity.

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