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Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new culture secretary, said the UK needed to “reset” the tone of its political debate and admitted a “real disservice” by political leaders in deploying extreme language about opponents.
Responding to the shooting at the weekend of Donald Trump, she said: “We went through an era in the UK and on the other side of the Atlantic over the last decade and a half where we’ve seen the rise in more and more extreme language — more heat, less light in our politics.”
“We have collectively as a political class done a real disservice in the leadership we’ve shown.”
She vowed that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government will set “a very different tone” in future — even though members of the Cabinet have previously criticised Trump using colourful language.
There has been a growth in political intimidation and violence in the UK in recent years, including the murders of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 and Tory MP David Amess in 2021.
Nandy acknowledged that some Labour politicians had used inappropriate language in the past, helping fuel a culture in politics where it had become harder to disagree in a respectful fashion.
David Lammy, now foreign secretary, said in 2018 as a backbench MP that Trump, who was US president at the time, was “not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath, he is also a profound threat to the international order”.
The following year he called Trump a “serial liar and a cheat” who was also “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic and . . . no friend of Britain”.
A dozen members of Starmer’s cabinet have previously strongly criticised Trump, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
In 2021, Nandy wrote on X, then Twitter, that Trump “was rejected by the American people and encouraged a mob to assault US democracy”.
On Monday, she told the BBC’s Today programme: “All of us will have said things, including me, that when we look back we think we could have expressed that differently.”
She said Starmer had been quick to call Trump over the weekend to condemn the shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and to confirm the new UK government’s “firm opposition to any kind of violence in politics”.
Among previous chastisements of Trump by Starmer’s front bench team were claims that he was “inflammatory and ignorant”, “a sociopath”, an “absolute moron”, “a profound threat”, “a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper”, and “the worst president in history”.