Donald Trump might have just saved Britain with huge moving of goalposts

If I'm reading the runes correctly, and right now that is probably as good a gauge to what is going to happen economically as pretty much anything else, Donald Trump might just have made a significant contribution to Making Britain Great Again. MBGA admittedly doesn't scan quite as well as MAGA, and rather sounds like a 90s club drug, but the shock and awe Trump has transmitted around the world has been a wake-up call for the so-called Western liberal consensus which had become enfeelbled, supine and utterly self-serving.

Throughout my adult life Britain and the British, at every level, decided we were no-longer a worthwhile nation. That the country which, more than any other, saved the world from the jackboot of fascist tyranny, which took on impossible odds and won, we were done.. worthy of nothing more than clinging to the petticoats of the EU and pandering to America's ego.

The Britain which so heroically faced down Hitler's all powerful armies, which built the Spitfire and the Lancaster, which never flinched from duty was now a second-rater - or so we bewilderingly told ourselves - and that we should supinely roll over to "superior" nations and learn our place.

We gave away our manufacturing base, textiles, cars, heavy industry, coal, and of course steel, and we gave it away so cheaply. No-one comes out with any credit - the right believed the unseen hand of the markets mandated we should just buy cheaper overseas offerings while the left were happy to see these sectors - vital to the health of a nation - as mere sacrificial lambs at the altar of globalisation.

So we turned a blind eye to the fact the overseas offerings were cheaper because they were made with slave labour, child labour or an indentured workforce. For that we should be ashamed. But for giving up on ourselves we should be ashamed too. We lost the thoroughly British ability to stand on our own two feet, to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in and, when the going got tough, to stand shoulder to shoulder and see off all and any threats.

And our common sense, perhaps the greatest of all British traits, died a slow agonising death. And the above applies of course at macro and micro levels. Our so-called leaders were obsessing over whether we should have trans toilets while our enemies were arming themselves to the teeth with hypersonic weapons.

We were wringing our hands over eco-nonsense dictated to us by an autistic Swedish teenager rather than utilizing the shale oil and gas beneath our feet so we could be self-sufficient and not held to ransom by nations who didn't much like us. And on a personal level millions of us went on the sick rather than work - started to believe the state owed us a living and it was their job to take care of our families.

We utterly lost sight of the fact we are in this together, and that we build together or we fall apart. And all the while, people from countries whose politics are centuries behind our own, who have zero skin in the British game, kept coming and coming and coming. But Donald Trump has just moved the goalposts.

In fact he has demolished the goalposts - the sloppy flaccid lie of globalisation has been laid bare and it turns out even people we thought were friends aren't. But there's good news. And the good news here is even Starmer - the best Tory PM we've had for ages - is realising the game is up. Standing on our own two feet, looking out for ourselves and taking responsibility for every aspect of our nationhood is no longer an optional extra in the post-Trump world - it is the only game in town.

The near future is going to be hard, be under no illusion. And it will entail adopting concepts which seemed dead and buried just weeks ago, nationalisation of steel and maybe much more, a joined-up Euro Army, fracking, backdoor protectionism, and tax rises. Lots of tax rises.

But just as big a job for Starmer is to sell the big idea that we - Britain - really need to do this, that we are almost on a war-footing. We need to pull together as a nation and partisan politics right now feel like a luxury from a different age. Trump is hoping his changes will give blue-collar America a feeling they have a real stake in the country... and it just might work. Starmer needs to do exactly the same with our "working people" - we need to believe in ourselves again. That's where we start.