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An underappreciated element of how the “special relationship” between Britain and US emerged in the aftermath of the second world war is that early on, both parties saw themselves as the senior partner. The US’s clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as “Greeks in this American empire”, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan.
In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin. As Christopher Hitchens would later describe, the post-imperial UK positioned itself as tutor to its young progeny and, in doing so, assumed the prefix of “Anglo” in “Anglo-American” reflected a subtle primacy of standing.
At the same time, another strain of the British right was seized by an outright hostility to the US. Self-appointed steward of English conservatism Enoch Powell, who in the 1950s and 1960s was seen as a prime-minister-in-waiting, before his fall into ignominy with the “rivers of blood” speech, openly disparaged the American project and considered it a great tragedy that Britain had ceded global control to its jumped-up former colony.
Powell especially loathed the US for the role it played in encouraging “self-determination” across the world and thereby accelerating the collapse of the British empire, a position shared by other conservatives at the time, such as Leo and Julian Amery and a collection of Tory MPs who styled themselves as the “Suez group”. Powell even considered the prospect of one day Britain deciding to declare “a war with our terrible enemy, America” to be a very real and even desirable possibility.
However, today’s British conservatives, while lionising Powell’s stance on issues such as immigration or the EU, have completely abandoned his virulent anti-Americanism. Instead, since Donald Trump was elected as president for the second time, they call for Britain to embrace its subjugation to the US, becoming more pro-American than ever before. And not even pro-American in the Thatcherite/Blairite sense of preserving the “special relationship”, but pro-American in the sense of desiring full ideological colonisation. This would include adopting US culture war templates wholesale, taking operational guidance and funding from US billionaires and even openly welcoming the idea of Trump militarily intervening in Britain to remove Keir Starmer as British prime minister, in Tommy Robinson’s case.
Why has this sea change occurred? You could argue that it is simply a reflection of diverging geopolitical influence; that in the immediate postwar era, Britain and the US could look at each other as peers, but as the decades wore on, Britain’s relative decline made it more amenable to playing the submissive role. However, that does not explain why, as late as the turn of the millennium, there was still a general aversion towards US culture that ran through all strains of British society. Whether we look at the vulgar associations tied to McDonald’s and baseball caps, or the rise of Britpop as a cultural moment anchored on an explicit rejection of American music, there was a tangible desire to resist US consumerism that filtered through British social life.
That resistance has now almost entirely disappeared, especially within the British right, which, in the age of social media, has been only too happy to embrace the language, the tactics and the grievances of the US culture war. Even the very term “woke” is a US word, tied to a genealogy of African American struggle, that never really made sense in terms of British cultural tradition – until Britain’s rightwing media seized on to it as a catch-all pejorative for everything they didn’t like.
There are elements of this dynamic apparent elsewhere in the west, in Canada, Australia or Germany. But the extent to which British rightwing commentators have been willing to declare their love and loyalty to Trump’s America has been striking. Far-right commentator Katie Hopkins even goes as far as fantasising about seducing Trump himself. However, this Maga obsession among the contemporary British right isn’t an entirely unrequited love affair. The willingness of today’s UK conservatives to embrace vassal status is mirrored by Trump and, particularly, his former “co-president” Elon Musk’s obsession with making Britain the next staging post of their global vision.
Musk tweets about the UK almost as much as about the US. Why? As we argue in my new podcast series, Death in Westminster, although the UK’s military and diplomatic influence has declined since the start of the “special relationship”, Britain remains a critical node in the architecture of global capital, with its banks, its accountancy firms, its legal system, its offshore territories, its boarding schools and elite universities. In other words, for the oligarchs, Britain remains worth capturing.
Of all the nation states that it would be important to control in order to be able to insulate your capital in this unequal world, Britain remains high up the list. Hence why Musk is investing resources in the populist right in Britain and amplifying its voices on X. As a result, even more fringe anti-immigration voices, such as Rupert Lowe or Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, understand instinctively that there is a pathway to attention, platform and perhaps financial support through submission to the Maga project.
As tensions between Trump and Starmer have increased over the early months of 2026 due to the president’s foreign aggression, the Maga-aligned British right has been quick to emphasise its loyalty to Trump above all else. Nigel Farage, the man who sees himself as Powell’s heir, rushed to Fox News to denounce Starmer and support Trump, a man he travelled to the US to campaign for during the last election. Articles in the rightwing Telegraph and Spectator condemn Starmer, not for bowing to Trump’s pressure, but because he has not bowed quickly enough or low enough.
As Trump’s war with Iran intensifies and his plan for reordering the geopolitical map continues to reveal itself, the question of what role Britain will play in this new order is an open one. But it is a question that seemingly can no longer be answered by a British conservative tradition, one that used to think seriously about Britain’s place in the world, but not any more.
By contrast, the self-described patriots of today’s British right seem giddy at the prospect of outsourcing their political identity to a foreign power and welcome the relegation of British sovereignty to vassal status within Trump’s new world order – just as long as they can personally and financially benefit from being the new comprador class within their own country.
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Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University, and writes on issues of law, race and empire. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire
