Britain’s Labour Party is incapable of interfering in the US election

The hapless British prime minister Keir Starmer can’t even fly to Samoa without another international British embarrassment breaking out. The latest is an angry accusation from Donald Trump’s campaign that his Labour Party is committing the crime of “election interference” in the United States. 

“The British are coming!” screamed a typically camp Trump-Vance official press release last night. The campaign denounced Britain’s “far-left” governing party for attempting to subvert democracy by sending almost 100 of its activists across the pond to sway American voters. 

“The flailing Harris-Walz campaign is seeking foreign influence to boost its radical message — because they know they can’t win the American people,” said Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles. “The Harris campaign’s acceptance and use of this illegal foreign assistance is just another feeble attempt in a long line of anti-American election interference.”

The story comes off the back of another revelation yesterday that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), founded by No. 10’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, had as one of its “annual priorities” a plan to “kill Musk’s Twitter.” Elon Musk is Trump’s richest backer, of course, and everybody knows that “countering digital hate” tends to mean shutting down speech on platforms that don’t already censor right-wing political views. 

The Trump campaign has now filed a federal complaint about Labour sending its activists to canvas for Kamala, and Starmer and his party are firmly on the back foot. 

On his flight to Samoa, the prime minister said that the Labour “volunteers” in question would be doing their overseas work “in their spare time… they’re staying I think with other volunteers.” Starmer also rejected suggestions from Nigel Farage and others that the initiative risked harming the Special Relationship should Donald Trump win back the White House on November 5. 

“I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him,” said Starmer. 

“And my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did.”

It’s funny to watch Starmer and co. furiously scrambling to get back in Trump’s good graces. Earlier in the year, when Labour needed to win an election and Trump was beating Joe Biden in the polls, Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy sought to make friends in Trumpworld. That was awkward, especially since Lammy had called Trump a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer.” Then came Kamala Harris’s sudden elevation, which brought with it fresh hopes that Trump might be stopped, and Labour tried to butter up the Democrats. Now, Trump is surging ahead again, and it’s back to Operation Orange.

But it’s also easy to understand Starmer’s frustrations. The Trump campaign’s fulminations about a transatlantic “far-left” plot to overturn the election are mostly hot air. The Labour-US “election interference” story only broke because Sofia Patel, Labour’s head of operations, foolishly posted about the volunteer scheme on her LinkedIn page — a post she has since deleted. 

As a grumpy Labour staffer told Politico: “It says a lot about the current level of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that an innocuous LinkedIn post from a party staffer has turned into a diplomatic event.”

It does indeed. The Trump campaign isn’t seriously upset about a bunch of young right-on activists having a jolly time in America lecturing the locals on the perils of right-wing populism. If anything, Labour’s amateur efforts will backfire — similar to the way the Guardian newspaper’s obnoxious “pen pal” campaign to swing voters in Ohio helped George W. Bush win re-election in 2004. 

The Trump campaign’s official complaint is really more a stunt to stir that very American spirit of contempt towards foreign elites telling them want to do.

“When representatives of the British government previously sought to go door-to-door in America, it did not end well for them,” said the Trump-Vance memo, referring to the revolution of 1776. 

The idea that today a bunch of Labour kids larping as agents for progress overseas might change the course of American history is laughable. It’s about as credible as the theory that Vladimir Putin secretly controlled the Donald Trump campaign in 2016. And that is the real point. Even if she wins, “Labourgate” allegations against Harris would not dominate the news for two years, as the Trump Russiagate story did. When the international liberal left tries to influence elections, it sees itself as acting righteously. When their political opponents do the same, it cries foul play. The Trump campaign is just highlighting the hypocrisy.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.