Is Britain Ready for America’s New Political Vibe?

Musk, Bill Ackman and other Americans are lighting up X with their outrage, accusing local British politicians, the police and public authorities of throwing vulnerable girls under the bus to preserve votes or ease racial tensions. They’re slamming Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions and hammering Jess Phillips, the Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, for recently blocking a fresh inquiry into grooming in Oldham.

Whatever the precise fairness of each critique, Britain must grapple with the full shame of this episode – an episode that, while it did hit the headlines sporadically, never became the campaigning story of the press and broadcast media in the way its scale and importance justified. Now, the unblinking American spotlight may finally force that reckoning. But this American attention is really just the first example of a broader force set to affect Britain’s politics: the vibe shift in politics stateside. Most UK commentators haven’t fully grasped the implications of how that different American mood music will shape their own political discourse.

Detailed by both Tyler Cowen and Niall Ferguson, through 2024 there was a sharp change in the dominant atmosphere of American politics. This wasn’t an ideological revolution, as such, but was amplified by the fusion of the Trump Right with a raft of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Wall Street financiers. Pushed towards Trump’s orbit by government pandemic overreach, executive jawboning of tech companies on content moderation and left-wing antisemitism after the October 7 attacks, this newly emboldened group of major personalities felt free to voice unfiltered opinions – and thanks to Musk’s X, they had a platform willing to host them.

This new vibe slams wokeness, mocks political pieties, shrugs at technocratic expertise and gleefully tears up red tape and HR rules. It puts free speech and meritocracy on a pedestal, scoffs at claims of sexism or racism and is willing to blow up the old order if that’s what it takes. In this atmosphere, unfiltered, edgy opinions – often delivered with a dash of humour or hyperbole – are not just accepted, but celebrated. These ‘vibes’ helped propel Trump back into the White House, and his second win has only solidified this rowdy new political climate.

Make no mistake: this vibe shift isn’t underpinned by a tidy political manifesto. After all, these same voices can cheer Javier Milei for slashing tariffs while also backing Trump’s plan to raise them. It’s about style and swagger more than ideological purity – a new atmosphere rooted in a few loose principles and an unapologetic way of expressing them.

And it’s going to reshape Britain in two major ways. First, because X remains a key platform for many UK political types, plenty of centre-right and right-wing figures have embraced this new swagger. Think of it as the reverse of the BLM wave: back then, a left-leaning Twitter fuelled mass virtue-signalling even in Britain, but now the contagion is in the other direction.

Yet if SW1 think it’s just the debate over grooming gangs this vibe shift will affect, they are in for a shock. That’s because, in Starmer’s Labour, the UK now has a Government that looks like the main holdout against the changing political tides – a party operating at the tail-end of the Blairite zeitgeist. With Justin Trudeau a dead man walking in Canada, Starmer is fast becoming a bogeyman for the American Right – seen as representing exactly the sort of politics they are fighting against.

Add in how the American Right now views modern Britain, and it’s therefore likely the UK will remain firmly in their crosshairs of these high-profile Americans. A bunch of disparate stories about Blighty have broken through stateside in recent years. Combined, they paint the country as having a ban-happy, small-minded, cowardly and technocratic political class, presiding over a stagnating economy, Net Zero zealotry, high taxes, open-borders immigration and a two-tier justice system that ignores serious crimes but puts the little people in jail for un-PC remarks on social media.

The current Labour Government is perceived as a proponent of the feckless ideological priors that led to these outcomes; the Conservatives as useless in reversing these trends while in office. Justified or not, the rise of this political vibe stateside will thus mean British political decisions get a lot more critical scrutiny from the USA, with a lot more unfiltered American-style discourse entering our politics directly through X and other platforms.

Even if Elon Musk’s sudden change of heart toward Nigel Farage means he doesn’t ultimately back Reform or any other party financially, the vibe shift he is part of could have a significant effect on the direction and tone of British politics. This morning, the Prime Minister felt compelled to respond. And in two short weeks, Donald Trump will be President again. Buckle up.