Donald Trump is returning to the White House. Whatever you think of him, it has been an unprecedented political recovery, delivering the largest Republican victory since the 1980s.
For a party which faces its own difficult fightback, there are lessons British Conservatives can learn from the President’s victory.
But this cannot be a copy-and-paste job. We need to be selective about what will and won’t work with a British audience.
The first lesson we can learn from Trump is arguably the most important – to focus relentlessly on your voters’ top priorities.
Trump’s campaign identified what mattered to ordinary voters. It wasn’t celebrity endorsements or identity politics. It was a promise to fix the economy and tackle immigration.
For a British audience looking enviously at America’s high rates of economic growth in recent years, it can be easy to miss the devastating impact of inflation on the cost of living and the Democrats’ poll ratings. Between 2019 and 2023, American food prices increased by 25%. Yes, their economy might be powering ahead, but it hasn’t been felt by voters.
Millions of Americans blamed Biden and Harris for feeling worse off than they did under Trump’s first presidency. They warmed to his ‘Harris broke it, Trump will fix it’ message. While Harris called Trump a ‘fascist’, Trump solidified his support on the issues that mattered to families who – just as in Britain this summer – felt they weren’t sharing in a recovery that existed predominantly on paper.
A positive plan for economic growth will deliver electoral rewards for my party too. If you listen to British voters, they care above all about the cost of living and their personal finances. It was a remarkable achievement last month for Rachel Reeves to deliver a budget whose impact on growth, to quote the OBR, ‘fades to zero’ over the course of this Parliament, but which comes at such enormous cost to taxpayers. With the Chancellor’s new payroll taxes hurting wage growth and job creation, and her public sector pay rises fuelling inflation, we should champion a lower-tax, pro-growth agenda to raise living standards.
Not far behind the economy – in both the UK and the US – voters care deeply about immigration.
Trump wasn’t afraid to set out a tough plan to tackle immigration. People felt like their concerns were being listened to and that Trump was going to do something about it. Policing a country’s border is a basic responsibility and competency of the state, and the Biden administration failed to deliver.
Conservatives know to our political cost the salience of this issue in the UK. The top reason for Reform voters to abandon the Conservatives at the last election was our failure to stop the boats and reduce legal migration. If we’re to reunite the right, we have to start by setting out a credible plan to control our borders.
People on both sides of the Atlantic want a stronger economy and controlled immigration. And President Trump promised to deliver both.
But not everything Trump promises is what the British people want. And as he has proven, we must listen to our voters first and foremost. That is why we cannot look for any carbon copy of what propelled his election victory.
The President is right to say Europe can no longer shirk our responsibility to fund our collective defence. Labour’s unwillingness to commit that we will even reach 2.5% of GDP for defence in this Parliament is an untenable position, and one Kemi Badenoch is rightly already challenging.
But Trump’s uneasy tendency to undermine vital pillars of Western security wouldn’t float here, where NATO commands 73% public support. Similarly, any havering over the moral or military case for supporting the defence of Ukraine would be as politically damaging in the UK as it would be strategically dangerous. To adopt Republican policies in these areas would clearly be wrong.
Meanwhile, British Conservatives must stand up for free trade – perhaps the greatest single opportunity of Brexit. Blunt tools like tariffs have been tried, tested and failed throughout history, and ultimately only punish consumers.
Finally, we cannot adopt Trump’s anti-environment agenda. In the US, acceptance of climate science polarises along party lines. But in every constituency in the UK – whichever party holds it – the majority believe climate action is right and necessary. Embrace climate scepticism and you end up a party of protest rather than a party for the majority, which we Conservatives know never leads to power. Let’s leave that misguided path for Reform.
That does not mean a big-state approach to climate action is the way forward. Quite the opposite. We should make sure we decarbonise in the most cost-effective way, and campaign to replace Ed Miliband’s hair-shirted statism – which has already sadly set in motion great and unnecessary harm, from North Sea job losses to higher consumer bills – with market solutions. Kemi has strong conservative instincts on the economy. We have to design rational incentives for clean energy investment, and attract the billions of private capital that are waiting to be unleashed.
There are many lessons from the Trump victory, but they all boil down to one overarching theme. Listen to voters and offer them credible, positive solutions. If we do that on the economy, immigration, security and the environment, we Conservatives can achieve our own, very British, comeback against the odds.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
