The sight of different world leaders toadying as much as the US president-elect – the prison Donald Trump – and his henchman Elon Musk is distasteful sufficient, however on the planet of realpolitik they most likely really feel they don’t have any possibility.
The nice American journalist HL Mencken didn’t reside to see the fulfilment of his 1920 prophecy that “in the future the White Home will likely be occupied by a downright idiot and full narcissistic moron” however he’s little doubt handing over his grave.
Nevertheless, the remainder of us must reside with this. And even earlier than the inauguration, the ramifications of the current presidential election end result are being felt far and broad.
The specter of the erection of a tariff wall has already contributed to the rising financial troubles of the US’s northern neighbour, Canada, the place Prime Minister Trudeau has suffered the sudden resignation of his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland. With increased tariffs within the offing, Freeland didn’t want to endanger a programme of budgetary stability by bowing to Trudeau’s plan for what she considered ill-justified vote-buying fiscal concessions.
In the meantime, throughout Europe the specter of a tariff conflict is inflicting a basic rethink of financial technique. The Norwegians, lengthy sceptical about becoming a member of the complete EU, are actually apparently having second ideas. There’s even hypothesis that the Swiss is perhaps occupied with this, though I shall consider that once I see it.
For the UK it turns into increasingly more apparent that we must be higher protected inside the European buying and selling tent than exterior it. The financial injury wrought by Brexit is now so manifest that current surveys point out {that a} majority of electors would love us to rejoin the customs union and the only market.
It’s unhappy that Keir Starmer nonetheless appears to consider that he can come to a passable commerce take care of the US, independently of the EU. Starmer and his beleaguered chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have scored sufficient personal targets throughout their first six months in workplace with out including to them by laying themselves open to Trump’s self-interested calls for for the form of a US-UK commerce deal.
Which brings us to the preoccupation of British political events and the media usually with that fantasist Nigel Farage and his misleadingly entitled Reform social gathering.
As soon as this authorities will get its act collectively and stops criticising the civil service for its personal faults, it ought to mount a full assault on Farage and most of what he stands for. In the long term, this is able to be useful for the nation and Labour’s personal prospects. By bowing to Reform’s prejudices in opposition to immigration with “canine whistle” indicators, ministers do themselves no good.
To take one evident instance of the way in which ill-judged prejudice is the enemy of the great: there’s a direct contradiction between the federal government’s ambition to construct much more homes and the bias in opposition to so-called immigrant labour. I say “so-called” as a result of so lots of the jap European constructing employees on which the economic system depended till not too long ago weren’t settled completely right here. As this economic system grew to become built-in into the broader European economic system, we resembled a area of the US: there have been provide strains of products, companies and folks – labour, in the event you like – and building employees would return continuously to jap Europe, which remained their base.
We now learn that the federal government’s constructing programme is threatened by a scarcity of something between 150,000 and 200,000 bricklayers, lots of whom would beforehand have to-ed and fro-ed between the UK and jap Europe. I notice, by the way in which, that Spain is encouraging immigration within the pursuits of financial development!
Now, each Germany and France, lengthy thought-about the powerhouse of the EU, are experiencing severe political and financial issues. However not less than, as an integral a part of the EU, they’re more likely to discover energy in numbers in tariff negotiations.
We have to be part of them; however, regardless of Starmer’s emphasis on higher relations with the EU, his, and his chancellor’s, cussed refusal to countenance rejoining the customs union and the only market go away his negotiating group with each fingers tied behind their backs.
However again to Farage. Worry of Farage and what’s now known as Reform was a principal purpose – probably the purpose – why David Cameron made his ill-fated determination to name the 2016 referendum. Brexit was Farage’s panacea for the UK’s financial issues. It has proved a catastrophe.
Farage jogs my memory of the ridiculous Roderick Spode in PG Wodehome’s The Code of the Woosters. True, Farage is just not as nasty as Oswald Mosley, the Thirties fascist along with his “blackshirt” followers on whom Spode was based mostly. However, having been largely chargeable for the catastrophe of Brexit, he have to be laughing all the way in which to Musk’s financial institution on the method he’s nonetheless being taken significantly.
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