DONALD TRUMP’S victory in the US will embolden the hard right everywhere — including in Britain.

It underlines the ongoing crisis of liberal centrism, which applies well beyond the United States and has its roots in the long-term decline in working-class living standards across the Western world.

Britain is no exception. It’s masked by an electoral system that gifted Labour a huge majority this summer despite an actual decline in its popular vote. In terms of actual support, the biggest electoral shift last July was not left from Conservative to Labour, but right from Conservative to Reform UK, which secured over four million votes.

So there is no room for complacency about the right’s prospects here. Labour on current form is not well placed to defeat an insurgent right. It already polls below 30 per cent, neck and neck with a Tory Party that ought not to be in the running so soon after its worst ever election result.

An insurgent right can only be beaten by an insurgent, radical left. July’s election saw gains for the left, too, with the election of four Green MPs and five independent socialists, four of whom stood primarily on a platform of opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

All this must inform our response to a Trump presidency. The Democrats’ loss of support was connected to their complicity in Israel’s barbaric war. 

Some liberals try to blame anti-war candidates for splitting the “left” vote. But a party facilitating genocide is not on the left. Blame lies not with those who couldn’t stomach a vote for Kamala Harris, but with a Democrat administration that continues to arm and fund Israel’s killing machine.

Trump, of course, is a more explicit enemy of the Palestinians than Harris. He has openly advocated policies the Democrats officially oppose, such as formal annexation of most of the West Bank by Israel. 

The British government will likely fall in step with whatever the White House wants, so this must inspire still greater mobilisations in solidarity with Palestine. Israel and its backers must be isolated diplomatically, and Labour must feel real pressure to recognise the Palestinian state and enforce a total arms embargo on Israel.

But that does not mean exaggerating the differences between Trump and Joe Biden. Israel has been aggressively colonising the West Bank for years with effective support from every US administration. 

Trump is readier to abandon lip service to the prospect of a sovereign Palestine, but lip service has done nothing for the Palestinians. 

The problem is US imperialism, which must be opposed whoever is in power in Washington. 

That also means resisting calls for greater European and British militarisation in response to the fears of liberal warmongers over Trump’s perceived lack of commitment to Nato or the war in Ukraine. Indeed, we should use Trump’s unpopularity in Britain to push for a decisive break with Washington and an independent foreign policy.

All this means rebuilding a mass movement for peace and socialism. 

Now written out of history, Labour’s big advances in the 2017 election on a socialist manifesto remain the only example in the last decade of the party bucking the trend of declining support.

Hope that “things can, and will change” rested on a clear alternative policy offer involving public ownership and redistribution of wealth, and an army of activists taking that message to community after community.

Keir Starmer’s Labour offers neither. This simply highlights the importance of building a united front from below, uniting the huge peace movement on our streets with a labour movement ready to promote and organise for a real economic alternative.

Failure to do so, out of misguided reluctance to confront a Labour government, allows Starmer and Rachel Reeves to cling to a discredited market liberalism that is rejected by electorate after electorate: and consign Britain to the same fate that has just befallen the United States.