OK to be white

Ben Wildsmith

One of the paradoxes baffling anyone engaged with politics in 2026 is the enthusiasm with which those who rail against ‘globalism’ import political obsessions from abroad.

In one breath, we’ll hear people insisting that ‘British values’, whatever they may be, are all we need to guide us back through time into a spinsters-cycling-to-church 1950s paradise of law-abiding contentment. In the next, however, they’ll be eulogising Charlie Kirk as a martyr to their cause, seemingly unconcerned by the thousands of miles between his political arena and their own.

We are encouraged to believe in a narrowly defined and Anglocentric vision of Britain that has no room for Cymraeg, but which can seemingly accommodate American concepts like the Great Replacement Theory or ‘DOGE’.

Atlanticism has always been present in British politics, with Churchill its most famous advocate but encompassing Labour figures like Clement Attlee.

During the Reagan/Thatcher years a unifying philosophy emerged that also appealed to Tony Blair’s reimagined Labour Party. Financial libertarianism and a market-driven society were genuinely held principles that straddled the Atlantic during the closing years of the 20th Century and beyond.

These ideas unravelled the Welfare State in the UK and the Great Society in America, promising that personal prosperity would replace the security of a more structured economy. The reality has seen widening inequality entrenched by systems that offshore well-paid jobs along with corporate profits.

So, the assumptions that underpinned our political relationship with the USA no longer hold. For many, though, kinship with America is a reflexive component of their worldview.

The Brexity, nationalist flag wavers of Reform UK and what’s left of the Conservatives continue to harbour warm, fuzzy feelings for Margaret Thatcher. Beyond the Grantham Valkyrie’s fondness for martial rhetoric, however, it’s unclear how her politics plays into theirs.

An architect and fierce proponent of the Single Market, Thatcher’s creed was free trade. What then would she, or Ronald Reagan for that matter, have made of Donald Trump?

Upon announcing tariffs on the entire world, Trump opined that Reagan had been ‘horrible’ on trade, thus breaking with 40 years of Republican worship of the ‘Great Communicator’.

Supposed Thatcherites in UK politics today are cheering for the diametric opposite of her beliefs by cleaving to the current American administration.

How can declared devotees of ‘small government’ square their beliefs with the astonishing federal overreach that Trump is enacting at home and abroad.

State representatives are demanding and pleading for ICE officers to be withdrawn from their jurisdictions, only to see thousands more sent in.

When they need to be investigated, as with this week’s shooting in Minneapolis, the work is taken from state agencies and handed to the FBI.

East Germany

Private businesses like TV stations are required to dance to the White House tune or face losing their licences. All of this is more redolent of Honecker’s East Germany than Thatcher’s Britain but still her devotees cheer on Trump.

So, what overrides America’s political volte-face and allows ostensible libertarians in Britain to back a repressive, centralised, authoritarian White House. For a glimpse at an unvarnished, agricultural take on how this is possible, take a look at this tweet from our own Andrew ‘Rural Trump’ Davies.

It’s okay to be white.

Obviously, this should not need saying.

But following appalling comments from Plaid Cymru separatists, it very much does.

Sarah Rees, who is standing for Plaid in the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend, used the disparaging term “pale, male, stale” to… pic.twitter.com/yzg1jUdjhd

— Andrew RT Davies (@AndrewRTDavies) January 9, 2026

If you are one of the 94% of people in the Vale of Glamorgan to whom it applies, breathe a sigh of relief, it’s OK to be white. Whether it’s OK to be Andrew’s size (or mine) whilst being floridly puce is a matter for our cardiologists, but white is alright in the Vale.

The future for this strand of thinking on both sides of the Atlantic involves the rewriting of history to remove the legacy of empire, slavery, segregation, and anything else that interferes with the pristine self-image cultivated by racist fools from Kentucky to Cowbridge.

I did my degree in American history and literature, studying in Arizona for six months as a respite from the dreaming spires of Wolverhampton. I’ve read, watched, and listened to more American culture than anything else.

For me, the foundational documents of American statehood are the pinnacle of political writing, destined to be betrayed by virtue of their lofty ambition.

Tyranny

So, to see America reduced to this pains me. It has never lived up to its founding ambitions, but enough of its leaders held that ambition to keep hope alive in the American project even as it routinely erred.

This, now, is cut adrift from all that. America is becoming a tyranny and those cheering it on in this country can point to no fellowship beyond skin colour.

The ‘special relationship’ between Farageistes and Trumpites owes less to that between Thatcher and Reagan than it does to the arrangement between the Kray Twins and the New York Mafia. But hey, it’s ok to be white.