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Keir Starmer may have survived his meeting with Donald Trump yesterday — with the president saying he was “inclined” to support the Chagos deal and might not impose tariffs on the UK — but it appears the president still has plenty of concerns about the state of this country.
Speaking to The Spectator’s Ben Domenech yesterday, the president was asked what he thought about Britain’s new prime minister. While Trump conceded that “He’s different. Different type” to Boris Johnson (which may well go down as understatement of the year) he was generally positive about Sir Keir, saying “I have to say, he was very nice. We had a very good meeting.”
But policy differences remain. In the interview, Ben raised the recent decision by Apple to remove its Advanced Data Protection feature from its iCloud service, after the Home Office requested “backdoor access” to encrypted data on the platform. Apple pointed out that this wasn’t possible — and so it was forced to remove the feature entirely, leaving British phone users at greater risk of being hacked and more vulnerable to government surveillance.
Interestingly, it appears that such moves have been noticed across the Pond. Asked about the Apple incident, Trump said he’d told the prime minister that the UK couldn’t do this, saying:
“We told them you can’t do this… We actually told him [Starmer]… That’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since Vice President J.D. Vance lambasted the UK for its increasing restrictions on free speech, now it appears the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about their privacy and tech laws too.
The president has already asked his treasury and commerce departments to examine UK laws such as the Online Safety Act. If they are found to undermine freedom of speech and discriminate against US companies, retaliatory tariffs may follow.
It probably doesn’t bode well for Britain that the president is now comparing it to communist China.
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