During a dramatic week in the US, Americans aren’t too worried about their British neighbours

Impeachment, a Democratic debate and the fallout from the UK general election have all dominated conversations in the New York office this week. But few feel there are big lessons to learn for 2020 from their British cousins

The impeachment inquiry hasn’t cowed Donald Trump, who has been using it as an excuse to get out campaigning this week (Getty)

Working on both sides of the Atlantic means that you can end up with some pretty dramatic fortnights. At the time when everyone else is winding down for Christmas – and when, most years, we’d be cajoling writers into giving us interesting copy and putting together features which looked back on the big events of the previous 12 months – editors who work in the US have found ourselves working two of the busiest weeks of our careers.

Last week, of course, was the UK general election: something The Independent reports extensively on as a UK newspaper, and something US commentators were surprisingly interested in as well. We were just at the beginning of picking apart those catastrophic results for Labour – what did this mean for a Brexit trade deal with the US? Was Boris going to cosy up to Trump, or to continue to hold him at arm’s length? How to explain the similarities and differences between our new prime minister and the current president when you look beyond the identical hairstyle? – when we were thrown headfirst into the next stage of the impeachment inquiry. And though we’re now processing the fact that the House has voted to impeach the 45th president of the United States, we’ll have to get up on Thursday and prepare ourselves to report on the next Democratic debate later that evening.

How much Democrats should “learn” from the UK election has been one key area of discussion among editors, columnists and readers alike. One of my writers, a current member of US intelligence who writes under the pseudonym Paul Nailer, told me that he was wary of Americans learning the wrong lessons from Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat. Democrats should instead remember the similar defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said, and how much of a rejection that was of politicians who chase the “mythical centre” but fail to inspire.

Another correspondent based in Washington DC echoed that sentiment when I spoke to him on the phone about his own thoughts. He’d never seen a politician so personally disliked as Jeremy Corbyn, he said: his view was that the British election had become almost as presidential as elections usually are in the US, with the people voting primarily on personality. He thought that the results were so removed from the manifestos of the respective parties that there was little point in Democrats paying attention on policy.

Perhaps it’s their natural optimism versus our renowned British cynicism, but most Americans I’ve spoken to haven’t felt that the UK’s election results point to progressive left-wing Democrats having a hard time in 2020. People on the ground campaigning for candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say that the UK got tied up entirely in Brexit. They don’t believe there is a single issue which can turn an election in the US in quite the same way. They’re right – Democratic presidential candidates don’t tend to spend debates talking about one standalone policy, but instead each talks about immigration, foreign policy, healthcare, gun control and political experience with equal passion.

Those who have positioned themselves as single-issue candidates have invariably lost out: Jay Inslee, for instance, who claimed to be the “climate change candidate” before dropping out; Beto O’Rourke, who stood on a platform of more stringent gun laws before also folding; and Tulsi Gabbard, who has knuckled down on isolationism and is barely registering in the polls, though hanging in there, even as she publicly refuses to attend Thursday’s debate.

If there is one issue that it eventually comes down to, it might be healthcare. A Medicare-for-All proposal which essentially promises an NHS in America is central to Bernie Sanders’s campaign, though there is speculation this week that his fellow Medicare-for-All cheerleader Elizabeth Warren may be backing away from fully supporting it. Joe Biden has argued that an extension of Obamacare would be cheaper, easier and (crucially) more doable in a divided country where Republicans’ hackles are up after an impeachment inquiry. He has shown open disdain for what he claims are pie-in-the-sky ideas about a national health service before, adding that his experience in the White House means he’s capable of seeing what’s feasible and what isn’t.

The healthcare issue proves how different the centre ground is in America versus the UK: here in the US, the centre means supporting gun ownership and a privatised health service while being sceptical about the minimum wage and sick leave provision. People often compare Bernie Sanders to Jeremy Corbyn, but the truth is that, despite his occasional diatribes against Wall Street, Sanders has almost as much in common policy-wise with a moderate Labour MP or even a “compassionate Conservative”. Time will tell if that’s what Americans want – or if, like British voters, they’d prefer to stick with a more right-leaning blond.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

US comment editor