IT IS A particularly British conceit to see our politics as distinctive, uniquely suited to our temperament and distinct from our nearest neighbours.

When we consider the rise of Rassemblement National in France, the Alternative fur Deutschland and our Reform UK, we see just how universal are the consequences of capitalism’s continental crisis.

Part of this peculiarly British mythical mystification rests on the nebulous notion that we have a “special relationship” with the United States.

If Donald Trump’s second term has a benign effect anywhere, it lies in bringing home the truth that while every faction of US capital is happy to have its transatlantic auxiliary working in its interest, the present ruling elements in the US do not elevate this subaltern connection to resemble a special relationship of equals.

Just how redundant is this notion is was revealed with the barely subliminal messaging of Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s head of counter-terrorism, when he upbraided the saintly Sarah Montague on BBC World at One. She had the temerity to ask about Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Gorka asserted: “There are factors more food going into Gaza than physically can be eaten by the putative population.”

When Montague returned to the question, Gorka said: “You’re interrupting me again. I will terminate this interview, OK? If you persist in talking about fake news about starvation in Gaza we are done, we are finished.”

She asked: “Do we accept that no food has gone into Gaza in the last two months?”

Gorka came back: “I’m not going to talk about this garbage fake news. If you ask me one more question about it we are done.”

Bizarrely he accused Montague of repeating “state propaganda” and added: “If you want to ask me about the incredible things President Trump is doing in the Middle East … I’m prepared to do so. I’m not going to countenance your propaganda.”

When Gorka was asked about the constitutional propriety of Trump accepting the gift of an aeroplane from the Saudis, he came back with: “Do you ever have pangs of conscience that you are so utterly and completely biased that all you can do is give in to your Trump derangement syndrome?

“Have you ever once said anything positive about President Trump or not knelt at the altar of left-wing ideology?”

So there we have it. A senior Trump appointee thinks the BBC is simultaneously a state propaganda machine and has subordinated itself to “left-wing ideology.”

EU illusions exposed

THE PURPOSE of this week’s conference in London of European leaders is to secure as far as is possible the European flank of British foreign policy given that the transatlantic side is compromised, however temporarily.

Keir Starmer says closer ties with the EU are beneficial to our economy and talks up the prospects of a “reset” deal with the EU.

Recollect that during Britain’s Brexit wars that starry-eyed EU enthusiasts insisted that left-wing opponents of EU membership were wrong to warn about the EU becoming a “defence” organisation — that it was instead a benign association of friendly trading states committed to closer relationship and harmonisation on all things social and economic.

The Starmer spin on the talks this week has been that Britain might well get access to an €7.3 billion EU defence fund. Access means Britain will be compelled to buy into this fund, inevitably at further cost to the remnants of the social fabric of of our increasing threadbare welfare state and to the destruction of Remainer illusions.

This fits into Starmer’s notion, in striking continuity with Boris Johnson’s sabotage of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, that Europe must be in a state of tension with Russia.

The controversy over a youth mobility scheme is a distraction. It is clearly sensible for our young people to be able to travel more widely in Europe and the the government already willingly allows work permits to large numbers of mainly younger EU citizens to work here, mostly in hospitality.

Such government-sanctioned and employer-driven immigration makes up the vast majority of arrivals here and a big proportion of people leaving are precisely these people.

Starmer is increasing intimate with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and uses much the same language as Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and notoriously willing to snap at Vladimir Putin’s heels.

Starmer’s morally challenged reading of the state of British public opinion leads him to replicate Reform UK’s narrative rather than challenge it, if only because this would compel him to talk frankly about the employer-driven prerogatives that compel every British government to big up small boat arrivals when remaining shtum about the big picture of state-sanctioned arrivals.

Amid the sterile debate about numbers the human, social and psychological effects of the British state’s changing message about immigration can easily be lost.

The reality is that immigration entails psychological damage for anyone compelled to move, whether it be driven by the forced migration that followed the destruction of eastern Europe’s socialist full-employment economies, by imperialism on the mostly Muslim people of west Asia or by climate change forced on African states which were colonial subject nations while the industrial imperial states triggered global warming.

Insights into immigration

JO McMILLAN’S new book, The Accidental Immigrants, is a finalist for the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. McMillan brings a sharp political intelligence to her expertly crafted account of a British couple living on a fictional island in the Mediterranean where a far-right regime is installed.

Set aside the irony of a book of this nature competing for a prize named after a police informer for the imperial state, this is a story of a romance struggling to survive in the unsettling environment of a society in which assumptions about social positioning, cultural values and political consensus are violently overthrown.

McMillan’s two previous books draw on an exceptionally interesting personal history — as a child growing up with her English mother, a teacher in socialist Germany and as a postgraduate student in China. Presently living in Berlin, her fiction is suffused with a sensibility that draws on the political reality of that intensely cosmopolitan city made up of immigrants from around the world.

This is an allegory and a work of political imagination but is firmly rooted in facts. It shows just how the 21st-century phenomenon of migration is indissolubly linked to the ways in which the dictatorship of capital conditions every aspect of social life and inflects every personal experience.

The hostile environment is a two-edged sword. It makes the lives of migrants miserable, but it is deeply subversive of liberal pretension. Starmer’s carefully constructed reputation — burnished to mask his unswerving service to the imperialist state — has endured the death of a thousand cuts.

But his slide into the poisonous waters of dogwhistle racism reminiscent so much of the encoded language of racists since Enoch Powell is marked by an opinion poll that shows that for Labour voters, he now endures a negative rating. As McMillan says of The Accidental Immigrants: “This is the story of what happens when there’s talk of migration as ‘a squalid chapter’ and of becoming an ‘island of strangers’.”