American political commentator Lee Cohen writes about the impact of Andy Burnham's anti-Maga agenda
As an American who spent years advising lawmakers on the bonds between our two nations, I read Andy Burnham’s recent words with a sinking feeling that has become all too familiar.
Burnham’s postures – branding American politics “polarised and poisonous” and accusing Trump of spreading global instability – signal a relationship with the President that could make even Keir Starmer’s dealings look positively cordial by comparison.
Reporting at the time noted that Burnham appeared to break with Starmer back in February 2025 by directly attacking Trump for bringing instability to the world, and more recently, a senior adviser was reported to have warned that Britain “cannot rely” on the US under this President.
That is not the language of alliance. It is the language of distance, and it carries real consequences for the Special Relationship that once anchored the free world.
To launch a new relationship this way is a recipe for disaster.
The Britain I first came to know decades ago understood instinctively that its security and prosperity were tied to Washington in ways that went beyond trade deals or summit photographs.
From the dark days when Churchill crossed the Atlantic to rally support, through the Reagan-Thatcher years when the alliance confronted Soviet power, the connection was never merely transactional.
It rested on shared instincts about liberty and the willingness to speak plainly when the moment demanded it.
What we see instead from much of today’s Labour front bench is a reflexive discomfort with American strength, especially when that strength comes in the form of a president who refuses to apologise for putting his own country first.
Burnham’s June campaign trail remarks made the discomfort explicit.
He warned that Britain risked sliding toward the same “polarised, poisonous politics” he sees across the Atlantic, where neighbours no longer speak across political lines.
The implication was clear enough: the problem is not merely polarisation in the abstract but the particular character of politics that has returned to the White House.
Starmer, for all his own difficulties with the current administration, at least preserved the outward forms of engagement.
He extended invitations, held the line on certain shared interests, and avoided turning personal criticism into a campaign theme.
Burnham has shown no such restraint. His 2025 attack on Trump’s return to office came just before one of Starmer’s own visits to Washington, and it read as deliberate provocation rather than constructive disagreement.
Reports of more recent interventions from within Labour circles sharpen the picture further.
To describe Trump’s second term as a “wake-up call” that should reduce British dependence on the United States is to treat the alliance itself as part of the problem.
That stance would once have been considered unthinkable in the Britain that stood with America through two world wars and the long Cold War.
It reflects instead a post-imperial habit of mind that has spread through parts of the British establishment: the belief that closeness to Washington is somehow undignified or risky, while distance from it signals sophistication.
The result is a weakening of the very relationship that once gave Britain leverage it no longer possesses on its own.
From across the Atlantic, the pattern looks painfully familiar. Critics argue that the same institutional instincts visible in debates over policing, speech, and border enforcement now extend to foreign policy.
The Special Relationship is not immune. When senior Labour figures speak of American politics as a cautionary tale to be avoided, they are not merely offering cultural commentary.
They are signalling that the transatlantic partnership is negotiable, even dispensable, in the service of a different vision of Britain’s place in the world.
None of this is inevitable. The British people have shown before that they can correct course when institutions drift too far from the country’s historic character.
The energy and hope around voices pushing back against the prevailing consensus suggests that appetite for restoration remains.
What is required is a clearer recognition that the alliance with America is not a luxury or a relic but a strategic imperative and that leaders who treat it as optional are placing the country at unnecessary risk.
Burnham’s posture does not yet determine the future of that alliance. But it reveals how easily the habits of distance can harden into something more permanent if they go unchallenged.
What is clear, however, is that the world’s most important strategic alliance will at best remain chilly until Britain once again has leaders with the courage and resolve to prioritise its own people and strategic interests.
