For all the ink shed on the subject of Donald Trump, hardly a word is said about his love of poetry. Yet there is at least one piece of verse he adores and regularly performs to cheering crowds. Last month, the White House even turned it into a short film. Called The Snake (and originally written as a song by Oscar Brown Jr), it is as close as this president gets to a credo.
The poem begins with a half-frozen snake, “all frosted with the dew” and begging to be taken into the warmth. His plea is heeded by a “tender-hearted woman”:
She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk
And she laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk
Stroking and kissing his “pretty skin”, the woman clasps him tight but “instead of saying thank you, the snake gave her a vicious bite”.
These rhymes are the very essence of Trumpism: never let outsiders get too close, or you’ll be repaid in venom. No hugs, just extraction. It’s how he sees business, politics and, naturally, immigration. His recital on the White House video is overlaid with images of brown-skinned men in handcuffs getting hauled away.
Watching his extraordinary speech this week at the UN, I thought again of The Snake. It is the perfect depiction of the dynamic between Trump and the British establishment – a relationship where Trump is the vicious serpent.
Last week he was Keir Starmer’s most honoured guest, enjoying a banquet at Windsor Castle and wooed by King Charles as “the closest of kin”. One return flight later, Trump tore into his host – “I hope the prime minister’s listening” – and lumped the UK among those Old World shitholes “going to hell”.
“You’ve bitten me, but why?
“And you knew your bite was poisonous and now I’m going to die.”
For the best part of a year, Starmer has hugged Trump as close as he can: an unprecedented second state visit, a night at a castle and a day at Chequers, photo ops with royals. All this for yankee dollars. Lower tariffs and higher investment are Starmer’s ROI (Return on Ingratiation). Last week he snagged his biggest prize yet, the US-UK tech deal. “Record-breaking” investment, trumpeted Downing Street. “A wowee number,” agreed the BBC’s estimable business editor Simon Jack. Prepare for it to be ballyhooed at next week’s Labour conference – and for the press pack to nod along. After all, they spent more time last week gawping at Melania’s hats than delving below the topline figures.
Yet if Labour members and other voters knew what had actually been signed in their names they would be angered, rather than heartened. Far closer to the truth is to imagine a snake in skin of stars and stripes, wrapping itself ever tighter around your land, your data, your water supply and your electricity pylons – all the while claiming it’s for your own good.
It’s not just the double-counting of projects unveiled a year or more ago, such as Google’s grand opening by the M25 or Blackstone in Northumberland. Such are the grubby standards of British government.
Far more striking is Starmer’s doffing his cap at foreign investors as “life-changing”. Most Britons will feel differently. The Glazers, Blackstone and Macquarie are all examples of “inward investment”, but fans of Manchester United, patients of Southern Cross care homes and customers of Thames Water could tell MPs how well those went.
So it shall prove with the £31bn of technology investments. Whitehall’s own publications make clear that most of the US cash is not going into new businesses or swanky offices, but datacentres – which are absolutely central to AI, yet barely discussed in British politics. Our government claims they are “the factories powering AI” because in Westminster “factories” is shorthand for production, people, jobs. That is exactly not what datacentres are. They are much closer to hi-tech warehouses full, not of people, but machines. They don’t produce, they store: your data and mine. Nor do they provide much employment.
Look at the planning documents for Blackstone’s new premises outside Blyth in Northumberland: more than 500,000 sq m for up to 10 datacentres. Blackstone estimates that construction will require at peak 1,200 workers for an estimated 10 years.
“Jobs, jobs, jobs,” promised Starmer. Really? Once up and running, the entire vast complex will need only 40 employees for each datacentre. But by then the Labour leader will be long gone.
Ask Blackstone what the permanent staff will do, and it’s admirably upfront: these people will not be generals of the new data economy but its lowly footsolders, on wages to match – the maintenance, support and security guards. This site was meant to be the bustling Britishvolt factory, back when Boris Johnson was at his most boosterish. Now it will be a giant empty Mary Celeste.
Yet the “hyperscale” datacentres going up across Britain are essential to Microsoft, Google and the other US giants who sit atop the artificial intelligence industry and who need vast computing power. It’s Silicon Valley that will own, operate and kit out the centres – and many of the billions that Starmer claims are coming to our shores will flow back west. It’s not the bricks and mortar that requires all those billions – it’s the Nvidia chips that go inside.
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These datacentres are the equivalent to “American military bases on British soil”, says Cecilia Rikap, an AI expert at University College London. They are spaces beyond oversight (the government doesn’t even know how many datacentres are on British soil) and their owners will demand low taxes.
“Take me in, oh tender woman
“Take me in, for heaven’s sake
“Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed that vicious snake
For Silicon Valley, the economy of tomorrow. For the rest of us? In the capital, datacentres are already competing with houses for energy and water. In documents published earlier this year, the borough of Tower Hamlets in east London warned of the risk of a “sudden increase in connection applications from datacentres, reserving available network capacity”. The consequences, officials warned, could be that “housebuilding, at scale, is unable to proceed for potentially 10 years+, due to lack of available electrical capacity”.
The UK risks becoming a “vassal state,” warned Nick Clegg last week and for the first time since 2010, we can all agree with Nick. We are tying ourselves into Silicon Valley’s AI infrastructure: its datacentres, its cloud computing. The plumbing and pipelines of our information economy are owned and run through Trump’s US. As the president flew into Stansted, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Jon Cunliffe, warned that the US could easily “weaponise” its dominance of the international payments system, flicking a “kill switch” to disable countries for resisting White House diktat. Think Canada, if it doesn’t want to become the 51st state, or Denmark if it insists on keeping Greenland.
And if you still think it impossible that Trump could force huge American companies to bend to his political will, just ask Jimmy Kimmel.
“Shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
