DAY by agonising day the price to be paid for Keir Starmer’s abasement of Britian before Donald Trump continues to rise.

It is paid in humiliation and ridicule. And while Starmer remains at the helm there is no end in sight.

The US attacks Venezuela and Starmer affects to see no breach of international law, declaring the legality of the kidnapping of that country’s president a matter for the US to determine.

Trump responds by announcing that the annexation of Greenland is his next target. Starmer makes an emollient speech assuring us that diplomacy will defuse the crisis.

So Trump then pours ordure all over the Prime Minister’s Chagos Island deal, essentially backing Reform and Tory critiques of the plan.

Still Starmer blinks, as immobilised as a rabbit before a cobra.

He explains that Britain needs the US for trade. Yet the lop-sided deals, which still impose tariffs on British industry and increase costs for British consumers, that he has agreed with the US remain unsigned, unratified and unimplemented.

He asserts that Washington is vital to Britain’s “national security.” Apparently the “independent” nuclear arsenal is so dependent on the US that it cannot function without the Pentagon.

So Starmer remains in a supine posture, meekly enduring every insult thrown at him by Trump while acquiescing in every outrage perpetrated by the president, even when it entirely negates the stated policy of his own government.

The times call for a massive rethinking of Britain’s place in the world, and for a leader who could spell out a vision for a new foreign policy, ending the 80-year subordination to the USA.

Instead, we have Starmer, clinging to the wreckage of the old world order as it starts to pass out of existence, a politician without the values or the imagination to do more than retail the stale old bromides and orthodoxies of a foreign policy establishment that has forgotten how to do more than echo Washington’s talking points.

It is now clear that his efforts have availed him very little with the mercurial Trump.  The new order of great-power rivalry is breaking with increasing force across the globe. 

For all the vainglorious swagger of “global Britain,” this country is a second-order player in that contest and would do far better to try and arrest its development rather than encourage it as per present policy, from Ukraine to the Far East.

Furthermore, the “Maga” movement in the US is intent on exporting its politics across Europe. With backing from the Trump administration it is working to undermine the British and other governments with a view to their replacement by the far right.

The president that Starmer daily appeases is thus both a menace to global peace and to Britain’s own democracy. 

Britain should break decisively with the so-called “special relationship” that has been a cover for imperialist aggression and exploitation, close the US bases in Britain, clamp down on foreign agents subverting democracy, and develop the capacities of the state to act independently of the US, capacities which have been allowed to atrophy by the establishment over generations.

That recovered power should be deployed to push for the peaceful resolution of disputes and to uphold international law and the United Nations charter. The fraud of “nuclear deterrence” need play no part in the mix.

It is past time to stand up to the bully in the White House. If Keir Starmer won’t or can’t then the Labour Party must find a leader who will. The new and dangerous geopolitics make the matter urgent. Following Trump will drag Britain off a cliff and onto the rocks.