United Kingdom

4094 readers

134 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

tom@feddit.uk

GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk

David Lammy dismisses past criticism of Donald Trump as 'old news' (www.bbc.com)

submitted 1 week ago by 0x815@feddit.org to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The foreign secretary has dismissed his previous criticism of Donald Trump as "old news" and insisted he would be able to find "common ground" with the president-elect.

When he was a backbench MP in 2018, David Lammy described Trump as a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath".

But in his first interview since Trump's victory, he told the BBC's Newscast podcast the president-elect was "someone that we can build a relationship with in our national interest".

Lammy praised his election campaign as "very well run", adding that: "I felt in my bones that there could be a Trump presidency."

[...]

In 2019, ahead of Trump's state visit to the UK, Lammy also posted that the then-president was "deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic" and "no friend of Britain".

Pressed over whether he had changed his mind, Lammy said the remarks were "old news" and you would "struggle to find any politician" who had not said some "pretty ripe things" about Trump in the past.

"In that period, particularly with people on Twitter, lots of things were said about Donald Trump," he said.

"I think that what you say as a backbencher and what you do wearing the real duty of public office are two different things.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] underthesign@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

What do you expect him to say and do? Resign because someone in another country got a job and you're going to have to deal with them? This is what grownups do. They disagree and try to find common ground where possible even if it's the thinnest strip of dirt, and you go from there. Where he went wrong was being super outspoken in the first place. Politicians should know better. As someone who will have to deal with foreign politicians all the time the last thing you do is slag them off, even if they're in the opposition party and not actual currently in power.