Rarely has George Bernard Shaw's aphorism that 'England and America are two countries separated by the same language' appeared more apt than today, as Donald Trump takes an oath of office for the second time.

With a Scottish mother, the President has more British ancestry that many of his recent predecessors.

But when it comes to economics and trade, the Starmer Government and Trump administration bring very different perspectives to the table. Even the silky skills of Peter Mandelson, whose short stint as Business Secretary is remembered well, might find reconciling differences tricky.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Labour Party placed all their eggs in the Democrat basket ahead of the election. Reeves's reverence for former US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, one of the stars of her partly plagiarised book, Women Who Made Modern Economics, has been unstinting. 

Yellen was her first port of call as Chancellor at the International Monetary Fund last October, days before Trump's victory. Her idea of 'securonomics', not much heard now, was rooted in the policies of Joe Biden.

There has been much debate about whether Britain can avoid the worst of the Trump tariffs, mainly targeted on China, but also focused on Nato allies. 

Trump's love of Scotland, and his golf courses and resorts could, this time around, make it more likely that the UK's biggest cash export to the US – Scotch whisky – is saved from a whopping tax. But that is too much to hope.

Anyone listening in to American Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's confirmation testimony on Capitol Hill could not miss the contrast between the guardians of the exchequer on each side of the Atlantic.

Bessent is a seasoned Wall Street figure, founder of hedge fund Key Square Capital. When he was working alongside George Soros in 1992, as Britain was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, he was largely responsible for the bets which drained the UK's currency reserves. 

Reeves may be a former Bank of England official, but her hands-on experience of how money markets work is negligible in comparison.

At the core of Bessent's testimony was a distinctly Reagan-like message on taxes. He told Congress that if the previous Trump administration's $4 trillion (£3.3 trillion) of tax cuts were not extended and renewed 'we will be facing an economic calamity'.

The contrast with Britain's 'Iron Chancellor' Reeves could not be starker. Her £40 billion tax-raising budget in October was all about supporting the public sector. 

Far from unleashing enterprise it has sent entrepreneurs scurrying overseas and undermined confidence on the high street.

There was no hint from Bessent of the doom and gloom which, until very recently, was at the core of government rhetoric in the UK. Instead, Bessent lauded the start of 'a new economic golden age of prosperity' ushered in by pro-growth tax, investment, trade and energy policies.

Credit to Biden – who didn't seek to upturn Trump-era tax cuts until leaving office – growth came in at 2.9 per cent in the US last year and the International Monetary Fund expects 2025 to be much the same. There is no whiff of stagnation.

The US has an enormous fiscal advantage over the UK although bond rates – the cost of borrowing – are not dissimilar. 

The difference is the extraordinary privilege of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Across the globe other central banks have little choice but to hold the greenback, so for the moment fiscal discipline can be averted. The UK enjoys no such advantage.