Dear Subscribers,
President Trump has threatened to impose 200% tariffs on alcoholic products imported to the US from the EU. The move is part of an escalating trade war, with the EU publishing a 99-page hit list of US products they intend to tax at the border if Trump persists with the 25% tariff on steel and aluminium.
Figures released this week by the ONS show that the UK economy contracted by 0.1% in January. This is just the most recent blow to an increasingly embattled Chancellor. The longer she fails to inspire confidence in her ‘growth mission’, the larger a liability she becomes for a government which is becoming increasingly unpopular.
Slow start to the year for the Chancellor
Military chiefs from 25 countries supportive of Ukraine will meet in London to discuss plans for a peace-keeping mission in Ukraine to be deployed after a potential ceasefire. The US will not be represented, though European leaders have acknowledged that there will be no peacekeeping deployment without some kind of US backing or guarantee.
Belgian authorities have arrested several people in connection with allegations of bribery and corruption in the EU Parliament. Lobbyists working for Chinese tech giant Huawei are accused of bribing former and current MEPs to promote the company’s commercial interests.
Influence for sale
The Trade Secretary, Joshua Reynolds, is expected to travel to Washington this week to begin negotiating a trade deal between the UK and the US. The government had hoped that the Prime Minister’s recent trip to Washington would have been enough to avoid tariffs being imposed on the UK as they have been on much of the rest of the world, but this has proved to have been wishful thinking.
Media
Tom McTague on delusions of geopolitical grandeur in Britain and France
Daniel Hannan on Farage’s leadership of Reform
Blog
Where does our security lie? By Robert Tombs
Britain’s oldest diplomatic strategy is in ruins. Donald Trump has begun to wake us up. We need to look to our security, but not just by talking about it. In present circumstances, sending inadequate forces to Ukraine would be insane. History rarely gives clear lessons, but this is surely one: to be safe, and to be influential, Britain must be a maritime power.
Another alternative would be to opt out, like Spain for example. We are not in the front line. We could hope that others would sort out the world’s problems. That has not worked badly for Spain, and it would at least be honest. For the first time for 700 years, we would become spectators in world history, hoping that aggressors would always leave us in peace. Deep down, we know they won’t.
Key Points
After an underwhelming 9 months of being in office, Keir Starmer’s Labour government appears to be making a concerted effort to seem more ‘right wing’. Commentators have picked up on the shift in tone, and have begun dutifully to observe how this Labour Prime Minister is doing things which previous Conservative Prime Minister’s would have been proud to say that they had achieved. Reducing foreign aid, abolishing NHS England, and laying the groundwork for cutting benefits are all being held up as signs that Keir Starmer has tacked to the right in government.
But this is all largely smoke and mirrors. Putting the headlines to one side and focusing on what this government has actually done or is doing reveals a different story. The cut in international aid is supposedly to allow for an increase in defence spending. But the Prime Minister has refused to rule out including payments associated with the surrender of the Chagos Islands in the defence budget. If they are included, then the UK government will still be giving away billions to useless causes abroad which do nothing for the UK’s strategic interests. Aid workers will simply have to relocate to Mauritius to continue profiting from the largesse of UK taxpayers.
Abolishing NHS England is supposed to be a sign that Keir Starmer is adopting the ‘DOGE’ mentality, scrapping wasteful bureaucracies and reducing administration costs to an absolute minimum. But we must wait to see what the plans are for the NHS in England before jumping to conclusions. This is the government that has established more than 20 new quangos, and whose senior leadership is saturated with career bureaucrats. So far, there has been no active attempts to reduce the number of civil servants on the payroll nor any real attempt to improve efficiency in the civil service. Reorganising and restructuring does nothing to reduce the size of the state.
Suggestive briefings to the press about cutting disability benefits are perhaps the slyest part of Keir Starmer’s rebrand. Having raised taxes on private businesses to fund pay rises for inefficient, unproductive workforces in the public sector, Labour are now positioning themselves as the party which can make the hard choices needed to keep the country solvent by targeting the poor and vulnerable. This is not fiscal responsibility, it is the ruthless pursuit of the economic interests of public sector workers at the expense of everyone else. We should not be fooled by the headlines. Keir Starmer’s Labour government is the same as it ever was and we should not expect it to change.
