UK’s Lammy Tries Browbeating Trump on Economic Policy, Doesn’t Retract Past ‘Neo-Nazi’, ‘KKK’ Slurs
The UK’s chief diplomat, the left-wing Labour Party’s David Lammy, has said he wants to ‘get across’ how he thinks tariffs should work to the Trump administration on economic policy, while also falling short of disavowing his years of insults flung at the President-elect.
Foreign Minister David Lammy has faced pressure to retract his history of barbs against President-elect Donald Trump, given his elevation from relative obscurity as a minor opposition Parliamentarian to holder of one of the great British offices of state in recent months. Yet speaking on Friday morning where he laid out his plans for working with the forthcoming Trump White House, the left-wing lawmaker stopped short of distancing himself from those remarks, while saying he would also be trying to “get across” his point of view on a major Trump policy area to the President.
When challenged on his years of comments and writings about Donald Trump, where remarks included calling him and his administration a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”, a “dangerous clown”, a racist “KKK” sympathiser, corrupt, and morally bankrupt, Lammy stopped short of retracting but said he now saw things from another perspective. Most intriguingly, he told the BBC that: “I am foreign secretary. There are things I know now that I didn’t know back then, and that’s the truth of it.”
Despite Lammy’s “fruity” remarks about Trump in the past, he has been leading a charge in recent months to get on the Trump administration’s good side aided by Nigel Farage MP who despite his total ideological opposition to Lammy’s positions, has apparently been using his strong links with the Trump team to help the British government put a good foot forward. Lammy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had dinner with former President Trump at Trump Tower in New York in September as part of this process, a meal at which Lammy said today the now President-elect was a gracious host.
President-elect Trump also didn’t seem to mind about the previous animosity between the men, with Lammy telling the BBC: “He didn’t seem to think it mattered a few weeks ago.”
He said of the meal, in remarks that really seem to augur well for the future U.S.-UK relationship: ” I’ve got to say, I found him to be a very gracious host…. He did offer me a second portion of chicken. He was very generous, very gracious, very keen to make sure that we felt relaxed and comfortable in his surroundings. He was funny. He was warm about the UK. Very warm about the royal family. I’ve got to tell you, [he] loves Scotland.”
Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Lammy is seriously concerned about President Trump’s promise to protect American jobs through the use of tariffs,. Apparently unable to get out of the mindset of other European leaders who have previously seen Trump as a person to be lectured to and hectored on how they expect the world to be run, Lammy said: “We will seek to ensure and to get across to the United States – and I believe that they would understand this – that hurting your closest allies cannot be in your medium or long-term interests, whatever the pursuit of public policy in relation to some of the problems posed by China.”
Part of the answer to this problem, he said, may be seeking cut-outs for the United Kingdom for tariff rules that might impact other nations globally, like China. He continued: “we would seek, with a new administration, to ensure that as a major ally we were aligned and we were considered, obviously. That’s in Britain’s national interest. Of course we do that.”
Ultimately, he said: “there will be differences and there will be areas where we disagree actually, I suspect. But there are also opportunities and we shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities that there will be as well. And we must seize those.”
