“What Europe is doing with immigration is a disaster,” US president Donald Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns in an incendiary interview published on December 9. “They’re decaying. They’re destroying their countries.”

Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, agrees. As Trump’s newest broadside rocked Europe, Starmer and Danish premier Mette Frederiksen launched an intervention in the Guardian, calling for sweeping changes to the established European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to speed up deportation rates. Both nominally on the center left of politics, they are leading a cross-European bid to push the Council of Europe, which oversees the ECHR, to make these changes.

Unity between British centrists and US conservatives in undermining international laws and norms is nothing new. We’d seen it already during the global “war on terror” or the Gaza genocide. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments have long dropped the pretense of abiding moral and legal norms on migration.