General Election 2019: Donald Trump dominates the day
The Prospect of President Donald Trump being in town has worried Tory strategists for weeks. Now he is here, and the Prime Minister will be hoping to dodge any public controversies, while conducting some important diplomacy behind the scenes. In the public eye, Johnson will want “the Special Relationship” not to look so special as to leave a negative association in the minds of voters in the last week of the election.
Aside from the generally rumbustious presence of Trump, a certain calm returned to the campaign trail today. The heated debates surrounding the aftermath of the London Bridge Terror attack on Friday have not gone away, but they have subsided somewhat compared to yesterday. Instead, the President’s visit to the UK for a NATO summit in Watford has drawn all the attention, with both Labour and the Conservatives seeking to use his presence in ways favourable to their cause.
Labour fired the opening shots earlier, when Jeremy Corbyn, speaking at the London School of Oriental and African Studies today, stated “In any trade deal with the United States with a Labour government public services will not be put on the table. Our NHS will not be put up for sale”. Corbyn’s speech was focused around the his pledge that a Labour government would campaign for a charter for workers’ rights, raise the minimum wage, and eradicate zero hours contracts.
The location for this announcement was well chosen by the Labour campaign staff: Corbyn had a captive and receptive audience among students at a university which is known for being very left wing. What he may not have fully anticipated, however, is the response of the US President to his remarks. When asked in London today about Corbyn’s allegations that a post-Brexit trade deal with the US would lead to a privatisation of the NHS, Trump said that this was a “rumour” and declared: “We have absolutely nothing to do with it (the NHS) and we wouldn’t want to if you handed it to us on a silver platter. We want nothing to do with it.”
Both Corbyn and Swinson have said that the US President is not to be trusted, however. Swinson in particular pointed out that President Trump has made contradictory remarks about whether the NHS would be the subject of trade negotiations in the past.
This is a fair criticism, given that Trump apparently gave a different response to the same issue last June at a news conference with Theresa May, who was then the Prime Minister. Then, when asked whether “the National Health Service should be on the table”, the US President said “I think everything with a trade deal is on the table.”
However, given that any “sell out” of the NHS to US companies would see a UK Prime Minister face electoral oblivion, it doesn’t seem to be the case that Trump’s inconsistency really matters. In reality, no Prime Minister would pursue such a policy for simple reasons of electoral self-preservation.
The charges levelled by Corbyn and Swinson that a Conservative government would seek to privatise the NHS amount to easy political point-scoring which will register well among their parties’ own rank-and-file. It is also an attempt to hit the Tories where they think it hurts them most. A recent poll by Survation suggests that Labour have a lead of 6 points over the Conservatives when it comes to who those questioned trust most on the NHS. This contrasts with a 28 point lead for the Conservatives when those surveyed were asked who they trusted more over Brexit.
Overall, it seems likely that this message will be persuasive for those who do not like the Conservatives, and will not be given much credence by those who intend to vote for them. At this point, voters have most likely made up their minds about this particular type of barb from Labour.
However, the Labour party itself has been placed under the spotlight today for the ways in which it has pursued its line of attack over the NHS. Last week, Jeremy Corbyn published what purported to be a leaked dossier of classified information detailing trade talks between Theresa May’s government and American negotiators, which he then used to attack the Tories over the NHS. Given Labour’s history with dodgy dossiers, this was perhaps not the wisest move.
Indeed, this dossier may be even dodgier than the Labour leadership bargained for. Independent researchers from Graphika, a social media and network analysis firm, believe that they have uncovered evidence showing that the way in which these documents came into the public domain mirrors closely the type of online mechanisms associated with Russian government-backed disinformation campaigns. Such disinformation campaigns have been show in the past to use fabricated and altered documents to spread false narratives online, and stem from social media accounts originating in Russia.
Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika, said of the leaked dossier: “It’s on the same set of websites” as a previous Russian campaign called Secondary Infektion, and “it’s using the same types of accounts and making the same language errors. It’s either the Russian operation or someone trying hard to look like it.”
The Labour party refused to reveal how it came by the documents. Deeper questions about precisely how Labour HQ acquired them will most likely need to be resolved after the election.
Meanwhile, the presence of President Donald Trump in the UK for the NATO summit marking the 70th birthday of the Transatlantic military alliance has potential pitfalls for the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, too. He is reported to be “dodging Donald” publicly in order to prevent any negative associations between himself and the US President from hanging over the campaign trail this close to the election. Instead, he will be wining and dining the US President in private, although apparently there will be no official trade negotiations conducted.
The US President has himself promised to be on his best behaviour, telling the travelling White House press that “I’ll stay out of the election. I’m a fan of Brexit, I called it. I’ll stay out of it, but Boris is very capable and I think he will do a good job.” The US President has also sought to reassure the press that he will be able to work with any Prime Minister who emerges after the general election next Thursday.
This will cause some sighs of relief in CCHQ, where the Conservative party campaign machine is hoping that an otherwise controversial President will not leave any controversy trailing in his wake which could upset the Tories poll lead heading into the final week of campaigning. One senior Conservative official has been reported by the Telegraph saying that if Trump “leaves without having caused anybody any damage, we’ll be pretty happy. But the potential for trouble is greater than the potential for any benefit.”
The President being here may be seen as a potential boost for the possibility of a post-Brexit UK-US trade deal, but for the moment, Boris Johnson will be hoping to avoid too much high profile association between himself and the White House.