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      Don't swerve the culture war – that's the lesson from Joe Biden to UK progressives | Owen Jones

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      “Culture war” used to be a term inextricably linked with the maelstrom of US politics. Popularised by American sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, it described how socially progressive and conservative coalitions were locked in a seemingly eternal conflict. It could make for surprising alliances, he noted, citing Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy joining forces in anti-abortion movements during the late 1980s.The battlegrounds of the US culture war are familiar ones, long regarded with bafflement by patronising and complacent European eyes: God, guns, abortion, gay rights and, of course, race. In a moment that threatened to temporarily derail his 2008 presidential bid, Barack Obama said of working-class rust-belt Americans: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” As the Tea Party movement’s backlash against his Medicare proposals underlined, culture wars became a highly effective means to mobilise low-income white Americans to vote against their economic interests.Brexit proved the detonator for the British culture war, which became not so much about our relationship with a trading bloc but about identity: we were no longer Labour or Tory, or working class or middle class, but remainers and leavers. As polling by Lord Ashcroft after the referendum showed, pro- and anti-EU were equally divided about whether capitalism was a force for good or ill. But while leave voters overwhelmingly believed multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism and the green movement were forces for ill, remain supporters believed the opposite.This set the basis for a clash of values that proved electorally fatal for Jeremy Corbyn: after all, the basis of any authentic leftwing project is class politics – “for the many, not the few”, as his Labour party put it. Culture wars are the toxic reaction to class politics.Yet culture wars continue not simply to shape politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but to define it. According to the Financial Times, just as Joe Biden swept the rust-belt states, Keir Starmer believes he can win back Labour’s lost red wall by copying the US president’s “emphasis on ‘family, community and security’ … and avoiding endless arguments about ‘culture war’ issues such as trans rights and the destruction of historic statues”.Yet this is a curious lesson to draw from the US. It is true that Biden’s past record can hardly be described as a beacon of progressive social norms: he backed crime legislation that led to the mass incarceration of Black people; his chosen vice president, Kamala Harris, was among those who assailed him for once working with segregationists, and said she believed the women who had accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But progressive movements have succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity within the Democrats to an extent no nominee can ignore.Take trans rights, which has become one of today’s totemic “culture war” issues. Harris has her pronouns in her Twitter bio; Biden campaigned promising trans people, “We see you, we support you, and we will continue to do everything we can to ensure you are affirmed and accepted just as you are.” He became the first president-elect to thank trans people in his victory speech, issued an order expanding LGBTQ protections and repealed the ban on trans military personnel.There were, of course, howls of outrage: one Republican senator questioned “Another ‘unifying’ move by the new Administration?” But according to the polling, it was indeed unifying: more than seven in 10 Americans support trans people serving in the military. Here is an instructive example. Rightwingers often push back at moves to secure rights for minorities on the grounds that they are “divisive”: yet, though noisy and obsessed, they are also unrepresentative.As it does in the US, polling in Britain consistently shows women and younger people are most supportive of trans rights, with older men least supportive. There is a complication here: while support for trans rights is a given in US feminist, “centrist” and progressive circles, transphobia is a permissible prejudice across the political spectrum in Britain. This week the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, condemned transphobia in her party’s ranks after it had led to an exodus of younger members. But while anti-trans activists are vocal, for the majority of people it’s not an issue on their radar. As the Democrats underlined, what is needed is leadership – or a vacuum will be filled by increasingly emboldened bigotry.But there are other lessons too. Rather than treating claims for racial justice as risking the support of white floating voters, the Democrats embraced Black Lives Matter. After the killing of George Floyd this spurred a surge in Black voter registration, and the relationship between grassroots Black organisers and the Democrats played a pivotal role in flipping several states in the presidential race. As well as working with movements representing the struggles of minorities – rather than treating them as unhelpful – a progressive political project needs policies that unify working-class people, regardless of background. Take the New Labour period: policies such as tax credits and investment in public services made a considerable difference to millions of lives; yet in its final years, wages began to stagnate or decline for the bottom half, and an escalating housing crisis hit living standards.The resulting grievances among struggling people can be exploited by savvy rightwing populists claiming progressive politicians only care about minorities rather than “people like me”.The answer, then, isn’t to swerve the culture war, or stick fingers in our ears and pretend it isn’t there. It is to offer political leadership, work closely with minorities to expand the electorate, and stand on a policy platform that uplifts the living standards of the majority, irrespective of their identity. To throw minorities under a bus is not only immoral: it’s a recipe for electoral defeat. More

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      The Guardian view on UK-US relations: rebuilding with Biden | Editorial

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      In British politics, everyone now loves President Joe Biden. That the UK opposition parties are foundation members of the Biden appreciation club is not surprising. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all identify most naturally with the Democrats and thus with the new administration in Washington. But the changing of the guard at the White House this week has won strikingly broad support across the entire political spectrum too.Many Conservatives now take an enthusiastic view of Mr Biden as well. In some cases this is hard to believe – or forgive. Not long ago, many of the same Tory politicians who now enthuse about Mr Biden tried to bet the house on Donald Trump. Theresa May rushed to Washington to court him. Michael Gove conducted a gushing interview. Boris Johnson said he should get the Nobel peace prize. A US trade deal was obsessively talked up. Today, these same politicians are all friends of Joe and behave as if they barely knew Mr Trump.Even so, the resetting of the dial with America is welcome. But if it is not to be merely opportunistic, it must be accompanied by more honesty, humility and clarity. Mr Trump was never the ally that the last two prime ministers imagined. He was never going to agree a good trade deal. He was always an embarrassment. And he was always a threat to the democratic and liberal values that Britain and the United States once stood for and which went absent without leave after 2016.Over decades, British leaders have often tended to exaggerate Britain’s importance to the US. Mr Johnson, an inveterate truth stretcher, is the same. The necessary modesty about what is realistically possible in the post-Trump era will not come naturally to him. The security relationship undoubtedly remains strong and important. But the new starting point should be the recognition that, in different ways, Britain and America are emerging from unprecedentedly difficult eras internally and in their international relations, for which they themselves bear responsibility.In any event, there can and should be no instant return to some of the US-UK relationships of the recent past. The two countries are not cold war allies, because there is no cold war. They are not military interventionist allies either, because there is no appetite in either country for such projects after Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Johnson is proposing some new grand strategic project.This ought to be a phase of rebuilding in US-UK relations. After the past four years, neither country is in a position to preach to others about democratic institutions and values. The US has just survived a potential coup, supported by a significant proportion of its citizens, to overthrow an election result. Britain has just backed down from a threat to get its way in relations with Europe by breaking international law. It has needlessly damaged relations with Ireland, our nearest neighbour, from which Mr Biden proudly traces his origins. It has now started a petulant row over the EU’s diplomatic status.This is not the way to win friends and influence people. Britain needs allies in the wake of Brexit and amid the rise of Asia and the waning of American global hegemony. Values and interests such as democracy and the rule of law matter in those alliances. To that end, Britain must make more and better use of soft power assets like the BBC, its universities and the aid budget. Mr Biden’s arrival in office opens up new international possibilities on issues like Covid, climate and internet freedom. But we need to be realistic. Britain must treat partnership seriously, not pick fights we do not deserve to win or make claims we can never hope to fulfil without allies. More

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      Hope and inspiration at Joe Biden inauguration | Letters

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      In years to come, we may recall Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony by reading again Amanda Gorman’s words, delivered to a spellbound inauguration assembly (Biden offers a message of resilience in America’s ‘winter of peril’, 20 January). The authority of her poem comes from the clarity of its imagery and the uncompromising challenge of its rhetoric.
      What it says ensures that, to relief at the end of America’s political nightmare and goodwill towards the two principals in the drama that unfolded, must now be added the assertion that we can “raise this wounded world into a wondrous one”.Frank PaiceNorwich
      • Amid the analysis of Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, it is worth noting that he referred to the evil of racism twice, specifically mentioning “systemic racism”. At a time when the UK’s Conservative government is determined to pretend systemic racism doesn’t exist, this is refreshing.
      But is any Labour politician willing to show a similar awareness of how racism operates in Great Britain? Will Keir Starmer step up to the mark and challenge the government’s denial and strongly condemn the systemic racism that blights the lives of too many people in this country? I worry that the Labour leadership’s fear of a “culture wars” backlash has already induced a reluctance to speak out for these fundamental values.Geoff SkinnerKensal Green, London
      • Perhaps Donald Trump could take solace in the fact that the crowd at his inauguration was definitely bigger than that at President Biden’s. Size matters to him after all.Joan FurtadoWhitworth, Lancashire More

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      Obama’s given the left a vital lesson in how to talk – and how not to | Jonathan Freedland

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      Let’s plunge into the gap between what people say and what other people hear. All kinds of things can grow in that space, many of them poisonous. In that gap, friendships, even marriages, have come apart; wars can start.This week, Barack Obama shone a light into that zone when he talked about the slogan that many Democrats believe cost the party seats in the House of Representatives and Senate last month, a phrase that took flight during the summer of protests against the killing of George Floyd: defund the police. The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach.Far better, said Obama, to say that some of the resources now spent on militarised police should be diverted to other services. If a person, homeless and distressed, is causing disruption in the street, a mental health professional should be dispatched rather than “an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy”. Put it that way, said Obama, and people start listening.As it happens, plenty of campaigners insist that that’s exactly what they meant by “defund the police”. But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds. And those voters didn’t like it, because they reckon that, every now and again, you need a police force. The word “defund” was sufficiently ambiguous – hazy on whether police budgets should be eliminated or merely reduced – that it opened up the gap, that space where distrust, confusion and eventually fear grow.The evidence supports Obama, and not only in the form of the assorted congressional Democrats who say the phrase cost them votes. One Democratic consultant ran a focus group of wavering voters who had considered backing Joe Biden but eventually plumped for Donald Trump. Intriguingly, 80% of these Americans – Trump voters, remember – agreed racism existed in the criminal justice system, and 60% had a favourable view of Black Lives Matter. When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it. But they drew the line at “defund the police”. In other words, the slogan hurt the cause.Obama has been attacked on the Democratic left, criticised for failing to see the urgent necessity of police reform. But that is to miss the point. It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support.None of this should be new. The centrality of language to politics is ancient and recurrent. In the 1990s, Republicans had an uphill battle fighting against an “estate tax” on inheritance bequeathed to the wealthy – until they rebranded it “the death tax”. Then they won. But it’s harder for the left which, by its nature, is asking for permission to change the status quo. For that reason, it has to craft language that reassures voters that it understands, and even shares, their starting assumptions – or, at the very least, does not play into their worst fears.The psychologist Drew Westen, whose book The Political Brain has become a classic in this field, counsels that the same voters who might reject “gun control” – fearing an over-mighty state trying to dominate them – often warm to “gun safety” laws. “Medicare for all” might sound wonderful to progressive ears, but what many Americans hear is a proposal to impose a one-size-fits-all system on everyone, even if that means stripping you of a coverage plan you already have and quite like: “Medicare for all who want it” has wider appeal. This has resonance in Britain too. There is nobody on even the mildest wing of the left who is not in favour of equality, and yet even that sacred word might not be quite as appealing as you think. James Morris, onetime pollster to Ed Miliband, has seen how many of the voters that Labour needs to win associate “equality” with levelling down. They think it means everyone getting the same, no matter how hard they work. Those voters don’t like that notion, believing it robs them of the opportunity to get on. And, says Morris, “they also have a moral objection”. They reckon your actions should have consequences, that if you work hard you deserve to be rewarded. For them, “equality” contradicts that. More effective is “fairness”, and the insistence that everyone deserves a fair shot.Keir Starmer might find such advice helpful, but the “defund the police” episode offers another lesson. It is that leaders of political parties don’t get to define their message alone. Biden never uttered the words “defund the police”. Indeed, very few Democratic politicians ever did. And yet, in several key contests that slogan played a crucial role. The Democratic party was held to account for a movement, and a wider cultural left, that went far beyond the precincts it could hope to control.Labour is all too familiar with that danger. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs.In Beyond the Red Wall, another Labour pollster, Deborah Mattinson, reports how distant former Labour voters in Accrington, Stoke and Darlington felt from questions that often exercise the vocal left, whether it be statues, gender or the more outlandish antics of Extinction Rebellion. It’s not that they disagreed necessarily on the issues themselves, rather that they sensed that these were the concerns of people with whom they had nothing in common: “people who didn’t worry about paying for the supermarket shop on a Friday”. And if the left’s loudest voices, amplified by social media, cared so deeply about those other things, surely that meant they didn’t care about people like them.This is the challenge for Starmer and his party. As the row over US police reform illustrates, it doesn’t mean softening the policy, but rather selling it right – and knowing that if you don’t define yourself, somebody else will.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Join Sarah Churchwell for a conversation with Joe Biden biographer Evan Osnos in a Guardian Live online event on Thursday 21 January at 7pm GMT, 2pm EST. Book tickets here More

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      Has political consensus become a pipe dream? | Letters

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      Perhaps the liberal democratic managed capitalism desired by Martin Kettle did exist in the 1950s, including the new welfare state in the UK (The toxic polarisation of our politics can be reversed, but it will take humility, 26 November). It didn’t prove robust – the Conservatives moved to the right and embraced free-market capitalism; regulation exists but is weak and largely captured by “experts” from the relevant market sectors.It is difficult to see how the idealised consensus can be created today, especially within one state. Multinational companies moving activities to poorly regulated locations and tax havens means that regulation must be multinational. The EU is attempting to regulate and tax tech and online firms, cooperation with which the UK has abandoned. The replacement of Donald Trump by Joe Biden doesn’t mean that economic nationalism will go out of fashion.Kettle is right that respect for the truth is indispensable. The problem is that honest conservatism has gone and, internationally, the right has adopted untruth as a weapon. This approach will continue as it has proved successful. Trump has lost the election, but the size of his vote and support for his untruths demonstrate just how successful.Talking – and listening – to each other in a truthful and respectful way is a good thing, but it needs that approach from all parts of the political spectrum. Kettle implies that such consensus-seeking would inhibit the left from offering radical solutions to our problems, because that may destroy any consensus. Is that how democracy works?Doug SimpsonTodmorden, West Yorkshire• Martin Kettle rightly highlights polarisation and the growth of the “I” society since the 1960s. Surely it is no coincidence that this coincided with a digital revolution that changed all our lives? Last year, I revisited California 50 years after doing an MBA at Stanford University. The wealthiest state in the world has failed to solve homelessness in the streets or congestion on the roads. Black people have been displaced by escalating house prices.All the talking and listening in the world will be of little value unless governments get control of the land and finance needed to build a fairer society. We should be using technology to map inequalities and invest in bridging the gaps rather than consoling ourselves with webinars and games.Dr Nicholas FalkExecutive director, The Urbed Trust• It is possible to share Martin Kettle’s hope for a less divided America without romanticising the 1950s. One need only recall those who left for Europe when “cooperation” was not shown to their differing political beliefs. The 50s also saw the enlargement of the attorney general’s list of subversive organisations. A loyalty oath was required by anyone wishing to enter a graduate programme or benefit from a scholarship, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities destroyed careers. Dwight Eisenhower was no Donald Trump, but neither was he a hero to those not in the political mainstream.Susan ZagorLondon• On reading how Labour’s general secretary has banned local parties from discussing the loss of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn (Report, 27 November), I was reminded of how Joseph Stalin tried to make Leon Trotsky a non-person in Russia. It is marvellous where the party leadership takes its inspiration from.Terry WardWickford, Essex More

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      The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it | Andy Beckett

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      For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”The fact that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has lingered.On rightwing websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode a “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect. They serve as a political distraction.Over the past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been a great strengthening of government against the governed.In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited, and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably re-elected, unrepentant.Yet even Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such as “activist lawyers”.As with Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first big Tory majority since 1987.In increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.Even people appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum – rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.It may also be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.The US and Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.Yet the conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate races in Georgia. In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.And the scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      What led to Trump and what will follow Biden | Letters

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      George Monbiot (The US was lucky to get Trump – Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat, 11 November) is probably right about Barack Obama paving the way for Donald Trump, because the former failed to tackle big business. I would go even further and say that Tony Blair, another “breath of fresh air” at the time with his Tory-lite policies, more or less paved the way for our Trump – in the form of Brexit.Both politicians had a clear electoral mandate to bring about fundamental changes to their societies: in Blair’s case, to change our parliamentary institutions, as, when it came to corralling business, the UK was very much, and still is, a bit-part player. In the end, his successor handed over a poisoned chalice to the Tory/Lib Dem coalition to attempt to clean up the mess and, after its failure, to face the consequences. Joe Biden, besides confronting neoliberalism, needs to do to his country’s political system what Blair failed to do to his. John MarriottNorth Hykeham, Lincolnshire• George Monbiot paints a bleak prospect for the US and, by implication, the rest of the free world. He writes at length about the failure of Barack Obama to change the basic course of social and economic conditions during his eight years in office. He also comments on how important it is that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia to avoid a Republican-led upper house. Surely it was exactly this that stopped Obama at every turn – the fact that during his presidency he was cursed with a hostile and belligerent Senate.The 2008 global financial crisis was one of his darkest moments, and I believe it was Gordon Brown who took charge of the initial recovery worldwide. Most politicians realised that it was senior bank staff who were responsible for the disaster. But as the old adage says, “If you owe the bank £100 then you have a problem, but if you owe the bank £10,000,000 then the bank has a problem.” They were just too big and important to be allowed to fail. What didn’t happen, but should have, was that no bankers were exposed and prosecuted. Both Obama and Brown must bear some of the criticism. Richard YoellBromham, Bedfordshire• I am appalled by the advocation of “tub-thumping left populism” as a way forward for the US. We have seen enough of tub-thumping populism (whether of the left or right) in the world during the last 100 years to know where it leads – to mass civil unrest, police brutality, military intervention, civil war, governments shutting down parliaments and locking up (or kidnapping and murdering) political opponents. In short, to unbridled anarchy, tyranny and mayhem. So thanks, but no thanks! For all its faults and weaknesses, I’ll stick with democracy based on free and fair elections, even if it doesn’t always lead us to the ideal society that we may yearn to see realised.Philip StenningEccleshall, Staffordshire• George Monbiot overlooks the way in which the neoliberal doctrine of “making wealth before welfare” has been massively overturned by the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the primacy of health over economics has been forced on even the most ardent neoliberal regimes, not least in the UK. This will certainly leave an indelible mark on the post-pandemic era. Unlike the disastrous neoliberal response to the 2008 crash, this time we are seeing the start of a possible end of its dominance as the prevailing ideology of our times, for the first time since the Thatcher-Reagan years.Adam HartGorran Haven, Cornwall More

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      Biden will put the US back on the world stage, and Britain must stand with him | Keir Starmer

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      Britain’s special relationship with the US was forged on the battlefields of Europe. At this year’s Remembrance Sunday, we remembered how we came together, not just as two nations with shared interests, but as friends, brothers and sisters to liberate Europe, defend freedom and defeat fascism.Like any close relationship, we’ve had our disagreements, tensions and arguments. But the values we fought for 75 years ago – liberty, cooperation, democracy and the rule of law – remain as important today as they did then. The victory of President-elect Biden presents a chance to reset that partnership and to tackle the new challenges the world faces today.The eyes of the world have been on the US in recent days – to see which direction its people would choose. In electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the American people have voted for a better, more optimistic future: for unity over division, hope over fear and integrity over dishonesty.The new president has promised to restore the US’s alliances and fill the void in global leadership. Britain should welcome this. The two biggest issues facing us all – defeating coronavirus and tackling the climate crisis – require a joined-up, global effort that has been sorely lacking in recent years.This election also had stark lessons for those of us who want to see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair. The Democrats’ path to victory was paved by a broad coalition, including many of the states and communities that four years ago turned away from them.To win back the trust of voters takes time. It takes political leaders who listen, learn and renew. Biden spoke to the soul of the nation, with a focus on who people are and what they value: family, community and security. One election victory does not mean that work is now finished for the Democrats; for us in the Labour party, it is only just beginning.It is crucial that the British government seizes this moment. Britain is forging a new path for its future outside the European Union. I believe we can succeed and thrive, but to do so we must be a part of the change that is coming. That requires hard work and leadership.It means working with other countries to ensure the global success and distribution of a coronavirus vaccine. It means building a more resilient, focused and effective response to the security threats posed by our adversaries. It means leading the global response to tackling climate breakdown, starting with next year’s Cop26 climate summit.I want us to be striking the best possible trade deals for Britain, which help to create jobs, grow our industries and protect our standards. That must start with us getting a trade agreement with the European Union by the end of the year, as was promised. It also means being a country that abides by the rule of the law.We will soon have a president in the Oval Office who has been a passionate advocate for the preservation of the Good Friday agreement. He, like governments across the world, will take a dim view if our prime minister ploughs ahead with proposals to undermine that agreement. If the government is serious about a reset in its relationship with the US, then it should take an early first step and drop these proposals.Equally, when our allies are wrong, Britain should be prepared to speak out and say so. We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose. That we are standing up for our beliefs and our shared values. In recent years, this has been absent. For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.• Keir Starmer is leader of the Labour party and MP for Holborn and St Pancras More