President Trump: State Visit

Debate between Liam Byrne and Nigel Adams

Monday 20th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner.

I want to start in the same place as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), which is as someone who loves America very dearly. I am proud to be one of the Fulbright scholars in this place. I spent two happy years living in America. I criss-crossed the country in that time, and it was there where I learnt about America’s warmth, beauty, enterprise, energy, creativity, generosity and resolution in the face of adversity. Those are all the values we expect a President of the United States to epitomise. Those were the values of President Washington, whose birthday we mark today on Presidents’ day. It was once said that President Washington could not tell a lie; this President appears to find it difficult telling the truth.

What we need right now, in this world of division and discord, is a shared defence of the values we have in common. We need a shared stand against disunity, a shared stand against intolerance and a shared stand against hatred. That is what we should be celebrating with a presidential state visit to the United Kingdom and that, I am afraid, is what we are not going to get. My fear is that this visit will not be a showcase for those shared values. Actually, it will be a showcase for the divisions between us. We have to ask ourselves what will greet President Trump when he gets here. I argue that, frankly, we are going to get the kind of protest that we see outside now. In fact, what will greet the President will make the protest outside look like a tea party. What we hope to be a special relationship will emerge as a strained relationship.

If I thought, similar to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), that we could take the President for a non-alcoholic pint, sit him down for a cup of tea or take him out for a curry in the balti triangle of Birmingham, and send him away a better man, I would be all for rolling out the red carpet. But what the President has shown us by his conduct is that he is not a man who treasures two-way conversations; he is a man who treasures one-way conversations, ideally composed of 140 characters.

Some hon. Members have said that we have entertained all sorts. That is true. Diplomacy is not a business in which we can conduct conversations only with our friends. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said, however, we hold America to a higher standard because it is our friend. Our shared values were pioneered in this Parliament in the years before the civil war. We gave those shared values to the pilgrim fathers, who took them and wrote the Mayflower compact, which became the American constitution. Those are values that we should be celebrating.

[Nigel Adams]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Liam Byrne]

I will not give way, because time is now very short.

My fear is that nothing would be left unsaid in this visit. That is a problem, because sometimes in diplomacy things are better left unsaid. In this visit we would hear the sirens and the protests, and my fear is that in parts of America that would be misinterpreted not as antipathy to Donald Trump but as antipathy to America. That is not something we want if we are to strengthen and reinforce the American special relationship.

The truth is that the history of British diplomacy and politics is littered with British Prime Ministers who overestimated their influence on American Presidents. I fear that our Prime Minister is about to add her name to that cast list. The state visit will be a mistake, but it is hard to withdraw the offer now. Frankly, our best hope is to keep it short, because my fear is that it will not be sweet.