Britain Has Stopped Doing Things the American Way

At the height of Brexit wars six years ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson locked horns with Keir Starmer over a second referendum that might reverse the voters’ 2016 decision to quit the European Union. The stakes then seemed hugely consequential: Johnson’s government, it was widely believed, would complete the Thatcher revolution by turbocharging its economic and social model once free of the EU straitjacket. Watching anxiously in the wings were Germany and France, both fearing the UK would become “Singapore-on-Thames,” a buccaneering low-tax, low-regulation offshore rival.

Although Johnson won the battle to leave the EU, Starmer, now prime minister, has won the war to make the UK more European. Britain’s neighbors need not trouble themselves about a threat from a dynamic American-style competitor — not least because Brussels’ negotiators insisted on “a level playing field” in their Brexit trade deal with London. On Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’ budget confirmed the UK’s tilt to the herbivorous European social-democratic model, a far cry from red-in-tooth-and-claw US-style capitalism.