The Special Relationship is Now Pretty Ordinary

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The UK Foreign Office and the UK Department for Business and Trade are rethinking some things

You knew that sooner or later, this was coming. From the Guardian:

UK officials are tightening security when handling sensitive trade documents to prevent them from falling into US hands amid Donald Trump’s tariff war, the Guardian can reveal.

In an indication of the strains on the “special relationship”, British civil servants have changed document-handling guidance, adding higher classifications to some trade negotiation documents in order to better shield them from American eyes, sources told the Guardian.

[snip]

Before Trump’s inauguration, UK trade documents related to US talks were generally marked “Official – sensitive (UK eyes only)”, according to examples seen by the Guardian, and officials were allowed to share these on internal email chains. This classification stood while British officials attempted to negotiate with Joe Biden’s administration, even after a full-blown trade deal was ruled out by the White House.

Now, a far greater proportion of documents and correspondence detailing the negotiating positions being discussed by officials from No 10, the Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade come with additional handling instructions to avoid US interception, with some classified as “secret” and “top secret”, sources said. These classifications also carry different guidance on how documents may be shared digitally, in order to avoid interception.

Companies with commercial interests in the UK have also been told to take additional precautions in how they share information with the trade department and No 10, senior business sources said. These include large pharmaceutical companies with operations in the UK and EU.

Trump sure is succeeding with that “disruption” stuff, isn’t he?

Then consider this: if the Foreign Office and Department for Business and Trade are doing this, one can only imagine what the Ministry of Defence is doing along these lines, as well as MI5, MI6, and GCHQ.

Slowly but surely, the Special Relationship is becoming pretty damn ordinary.

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18 replies
  1. Ewan Woodsend says:

    Unfortunately, regarding intelligence, Five Eyes meant a number of things have been shared already, and that is a real concern I would imagine.

  2. scroogemcduck says:

    No-one in their right mind would want confidential defense information going anywhere near Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem or Tulsi Gabbard.

    Or Donald Trump. As Jasmine Crockett put it, he stored national secrets in the shitter.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        That’s the UK’s Supreme Court, not Starmer. But Parliament could overrule that ruling to protect the Trans community with a single piece of legislation. But it’s as unlikely come from Starmer as from his Tory counterpart.

        • P J Evans says:

          Their previous moves have not been good for trans people, either. (Rowling is feeding a lot of her money into the anti-trans movement there. She’s worse than we thought.)

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          JK Rowling has been worse than we thought for quite some time. Even her neighbors in Edinburgh want little to do with her, except to make her stop buying up adjacent properties, to increase her domain and her privacy.

        • P J Evans says:

          earlofhuntingdon says: April 17, 2025 at 2:55 pm
          Maybe she’d do better in England, where she’d be more likely to find people who like her.

        • BRUCE F COLE says:

          Unlikely in the extreme:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psjBZJGt7Fs

          Smarmy Starmer isn’t going to buck the guy he nuzzled so cloyingly in that inglorious nose-browning event. His knee-pad-enabled performance was so sickening that it overshadowed Trump’s mispronouncing of his own wife’s name at 1:03. It gave new, oleaginous meaning to the “special relationship,” which has been lopsided in the US’ favor for a century, especially since WWII.

          My wife and I watched the recent BBC re-release of the 2019 film, Red Joan, starring Judi Dench the other night. It casts the lady Dench plays, the person who gave the USSR A-bomb construction secrets after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a very favorable light — and it casts the “special relationship” as thoroughly dysfunctional and as the underlying cause of that Russian intel coup.
          https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/2033743/hit-spy-thriller-judi-dench

          I’m wondering about the timing of that re-release, whether it’s an institutional slap in the face of the “We’re running this show, you needn’t bother us about it” America of today.

    • Frank Anon says:

      What do you think the payoff for Rowling is, to dedicate this chapter of her life solely to anti-Trans activities? Is it the adoration she has received from the TERF folks, boredom in extreme wealth, teaching the world what research she has done? Her serenity in the cocoon of hatred both appalls and fascinates, but I’m not sure why she does it

      • Bugboy321 says:

        My pet theory is that, like so many other lunatics in society, ridiculously wealthy individuals let it go to their heads that there are people who will gladly kiss their ass all day and all night long.

        • Rayne says:

          Most of the ridiculously wealthy in the US were privileged *before* they became ridiculously wealthy. They didn’t experience any suffering to earn a meager living; any inconvenience they experienced has been optional, performative, unnecessary, ex. Musk sleeping in the office instead of going home to bed.

          They all need a crack alongside the head with a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Conditions haven’t substantively changed for the working poor since that text was published in 2001. They may even have gotten worse since housing is much tighter than it was, and we’ve been through an economic crisis and a pandemic since then.

          The ridiculously wealthy are fucking clueless parasites for the most part. There are few exceptions.

        • Bugboy321 says:

          @Rayne says: April 18, 2025 at 10:53 am

          I recently saw Bong Joon Ho’s movie “Parasite”, and wow does that underline how clueless the wealthy are! Like, exactly WHO are the parasites here, anyway? The dirt-poor but resourceful Korean family? Or the rich architect’s wife who failed to notice the housekeeper’s husband squirreled away in the secret bunker, but which her son did, traumatized into believing he was a ghost.

          But to your point, thanks for the reference, but these people should not need a book upside the head to understand what the term “torches and pitchforks” means in the inevitable context of the oppression of labor.

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