Ruth Davidson: ‘We are beginning to reassess how reliable an ally the United States is’

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson - Image credit: David Anderson/Holyrood

Ruth Davidson has claimed during a speaking engagement in Washington that the UK is “beginning to reassess” how reliable the United States is as an ally.

Davidson’s comments contrast sharply with the UK party leader, Theresa May, who has said the United States is a “close ally” of the UK and was the first European leader to meet with President Trump.

The Scottish Conservative leader questioned the UK’s ongoing relationship with America in an interview at The New York Times’ Women in the World event in Washington DC yesterday.

She said: “At the moment, from the UK, we’ve always seen America as being a very strong, a very reliable ally and now, even after only 26 days, or however long the tenure has been so far, in Pennsylvania Avenue, we are beginning to reassess how reliable an ally the United States is.

“And that’s a huge change in Europe. That’s a massive, massive shock.”

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And in a clear criticism of President Trump’s relationship with the press, she suggested that politicians demonising the media should “worry us all”.

“We have to be very careful about popular nationalists, populist strongmen, part demagogues, using a lot of their political capital at the beginning of their journey to delegitimise public scrutiny, which is what demonising the media does,” she said.

“And I think that if we learn our lessons from history, there is a very strategic reason why you’d do that, and I think that should worry us all.”

Davidson also told interviewer, CBS News foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan, that although she was not what you might expect a Conservative to be, as a former journalist who had interviewed politicians every day, including for the BBC, she wasn’t foreign to the political world.

“It wasn’t like a bunch of one-step-away-from-white-supremacist bloggers that are living just up the street,” she added.

Davidson, along with the other party leaders in the Scottish Parliament, has been outspoken in her opposition to Trump in the past, in contrast to the much more positive position of her fellow Conservatives in the UK Government.

The Prime Minister, Theresa May, was the first world leader to visit Trump after he became president and has invited him on a controversial state visit to Britain.

Responding to opposition to the visit and the US president’s ban on travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, she said last month: “The United States is a close ally of the United Kingdom.

“We work together across many areas of mutual interest and we have that special relationship between us.”

Despite the protests against the visit, including an intervention by House of Commons speaker John Bercow, May confirmed on Valentine’s Day she was “looking forward” to it.

The White House also appears to have a warmer view of the UK than it does of the EU.

Trump's choice for US ambassador to the EU is the anti-EU Ted Malloch, who last week wrote in Holyrood’s sister title, The Parliament Magazine: “We do know that the US and the UK are different from Europe: we want democracy and accountability, while the EU is intrinsically undemocratic and unaccountable.”

Davidson’s comments came just hours before the new US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, met with foreign counterparts, including UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, for the first time at the G20 in Germany.

Holyrood contacted the Foreign Office for a response to Davidson’s statement about the UK’s relationship with the US and it indicated that the UK's position has not changed.