ON September 11, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer decided it was no longer tolerable to support his pick as ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, who had described the convicted US paedophile and sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, as “my best pal.”

Less than a week later, Starmer welcomed to Britain a man who Epstein once described as his “closest friend” over a period of three decades, US President Donald Trump.

That hypocrisy was not lost on many of the women who joined the thousands marching through London on Wednesday to protest Trump’s state visit.

Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape said she was disgusted by “the cover-ups that have gone on about the whole paedophile scandal around Jeffrey Epstein. OK, they’ve called out Mandelson and got rid of him. What about all the others?” she asked.

Many were afraid that the dictatorial and overtly misogynist and racist policies now in place in the US, where immigrants are being terrorised and deported and women’s rights slashed, were drifting across the Atlantic.

“We are children of the 1970s. We remember the National Front when they were on the march,” said Santini More, who had travelled from Birmingham to attend the Stop Trump rally with her sister Wendy.

“We remember that then it was the Anti-Nazi League that we were behind, it was Rock Against Racism. And the government of the day, the Labour government of the day, supported those things. I don’t hear that from the Labour Prime Minister at the moment and that is a disgrace. And that’s why Nigel Farage is being allowed to inveigle himself into the consciousness of the people.”

Trump, they agreed, had given permission for the racists in both countries to give free expression to their views. “Which is unfortunate because we suffer, we the working people, we the people of colour, black people, Asian people, we are going to suffer,” said Wendy More.

“And they’re not protecting us, you see, because now it’s almost encouraged to be racist, because that’s my right, I can say those nasty things. That’s the fear over here. It’s dangerous times.”

Starmer’s unwillingness to disavow Trump and his misogynistic views on women — all too apparent from the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tapes that came to light even before Trump’s first presidency — is particularly infuriating to women. Women make up the segment of society most harmed by the draconian cuts to social services that Starmer’s Labour government inherited but has refused to undo.

“He’s always going on about how he defends women’s rights and girls’ rights and he’s really anti-rape. He’s not,” said Longstaff of Starmer. “He’s the one who, under his leadership in the Crown Prosecution Service, the number of women who were prosecuted for lying about rape shot up. It used to be about 10 before he got into power. In the years he was in power, it went up to 40 in one year!”

Now, Longstaff said, MPs are intent on criminalising women who turn to sex work if they cannot feed their children.

“The benefits have been cut. How are you supposed to survive?” asked Longstaff, who has been with Women Against Rape for four decades. “And they make it into a whole moral issue. What about the morality of kids starving and kids having to go to school hungry and not having a warm home to live in and a secure place to live?”

Wednesday’s march and rally, organised by the Stop Trump Coalition, reflected a host of different — but connected — perspectives, with a heavy pro-Palestine presence. There were banners — and speakers — demanding an end to racism, the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and the blockade on Cuba. There were people supporting trade unions, action on climate change, and the rights of asylum-seekers, immigrants and the LGBTQ community.

There were speakers from activist groups, members of Parliament, and music by Billy Bragg, who called Trump’s visit “a moment of national humiliation.” But most of all, there was alarm that the US system of control by the 1 per cent, with corporations reaping the profits off the backs of working people, would soon be the norm in Britain as well.

That, observed some in the crowd, was all too apparent in the £150 billion deal being signed between the US and British governments and major companies such as Palantir, Boeing, Google and Microsoft, designed to benefit the profit motives of multinational corporations and their owners.

These latter include billionaire Bill Gates, whose company, TerraPower, is part of the “golden age of nuclear” deal between Britain and the US announced earlier in the week, with language straight out of Trump’s gilded playbook.

Gates has already scored a £1.4bn taxpayer subsidy for TerraPower to fund his still unlicensed Natrium nuclear reactor in the US. British taxpayers can expect more of the same.

Meanwhile, as four members of Led By Donkeys were released on bail after projecting a nine-minute video of Trump and Epstein onto a Windsor Castle tower on Tuesday evening, the implications of that sordid relationship were not lost on protesters in London the next day.

As one of the Stop Trump Coalition organisers noted, it was the voices of women that were once again leading Wednesday’s march, just as they had the previous Saturday at the counter-protest against the supporters of far-right fascist Tommy Robinson. The overt racism they saw there is fuelled, they fear, by Trump’s frequent expression of hatred — uttered with both venom and impunity — towards anyone who disagrees with him.

The More sisters, both wearing T-shirts featuring an image of former US President Barack Obama, recalled how under his presidency, while “he wasn’t perfect, if you did not agree with him, he would say OK, you have the right to voice that, and he wouldn’t shut you down, he wouldn’t call you vile, offensive names.”

“Our fear is that what’s happening in US now could happen here in England,” Santini added. “And that’s why we wanted to turn out in big numbers and say ‘no, no, not in Britain’.”

Longstaff echoed similar sentiments. The Trump government, she said, “don’t do one bloody thing for the working-class people in the US, and the worst thing about it all for me is that it’s happening here as well.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently covering events in London.