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Why tariffs work
To travel by train through America’s rustbelt is to witness the real reason for Trump’s tariff revolution. Miles upon miles of derelict factories and decaying industrial architecture stand as monuments to trade policies which have gutted America’s manufacturing heartland and undermined the families – and the towns – which depended on it. In electing the Trump-Vance ticket last year American voters have called time on decades of elite indifference to industrial production and the liberal trade policies which have accompanied it.
It turns out that the transitory profit secured by executives who out-sourced thousands of US industrial jobs to cheaper jurisdictions is no compensation for the loss of your industrial base. Trade deficits have not only caused social breakdown, they have gradually beggared the wider American economy. A strong creditor nation has been turned into the world’s biggest debtor. Trump and Vance grasp this – and they are right to try to correct it.
Free trade advocates have dominated the academic, economic and political landscape for decades and so at first sight Trump’s protectionism might seems wildly heterodox. However, trade protectionism is legitimate, necessary and can be effective. I’ll explain why.
First, while international trade undoubtedly boosts total production and global welfare it’s a mistake to advocate total free trade at all times and in all places. Economic history shows that at certain times forms of industrial protectionism can benefit a nation. After all, the United States developed its manufacturing behind a tariff wall and prospered as a result. Virtually all states practice forms of protectionism from time to time for very good reason. Politically, this is nothing new. It was the position of my favourite Edwardian Tory, F. E. Smith, who argued in 1909:
It is a waste of time to consider where we stand as between free trade and protection. We are offered no such choice. We must choose between protection and one-sided free imports. Confronted with such alternatives, if this indeed be the choice, I am a protectionist.
Secondly, Trump is facing the fact that the United States has a massive trade problem which is making American citizens poorer and strategically weakening the country. The US runs colossal trade deficits year after year. In 2024 it was $1.2 trillion. Some economic liberals think it doesn’t matter. This is completely wrong. Americans – like any other nation – can pay for imports in three ways: by exporting things, by selling assets, or by issuing debt. Running a huge trade deficit means selling assets and raising debt. This isn’t a theory – it’s just mathematics. Debt-fuelled consumption is not prosperity. It’s the reverse, a form of instant gratification.
Third, Trump and his team are correct in understanding that the US trade gap cannot be narrowed by continuing the trade and industrial policies which caused it. An urgent policy switch is required as it becomes evident that continued indifference of the American ruling class to what is made where and by whom will lead to further beggary. This is partly because of an apparent paradox: cheap goods are more costly than you might think. If a local economy based on production is replaced with one based on debt a whole series of wider problems emerge. The factories close, the drug dealers move in and the industrial wage – once the foundation of the family – is destroyed. And as the benefits bill ramps up, the state must borrow money to mop up the blood. Yes, Americans have cheap imported goods at Walmart, but if a town loses its industry there are fewer consumers and more debtors in the end.
The current system of international trade has created huge economic imbalances which need correcting
Trump and Vance are also correct in noticing that production and trade is not all about price. Sometimes national security must come first. China now outstrips US industrial production in virtually every category – automotive, maritime, consumer technology and in heavy engineering. Ultimately, the continued military supremacy of the United States is put at risk if its industrial capacity continues to be allowed to degrade. The security of the United States and all of its allies is at stake.
Finally, it is significant that Trump’s tariff policy came with the fulsome praise of the United Auto Workers union. Its president, Shawn Fain, described them as the end of a 30-year-plus ‘free trade’ disaster which has ‘devastated the working class’. Fain also produced a long list of underutilised auto plants throughout the United States – in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Kansas and Tennessee – which would take up the slack and substitute imports with American production. Given time, and the right trade policies, he’s probably right.
The current system of international trade has created huge economic imbalances which need correcting. Trump recognises this. His ‘Liberation Day’ policies will not only change the world, they will change they way we see the world. They will give national states greater freedom to re-industrialise, to protect strategically important sectors and to make some of their own social and economic bargains. For the first time in 40 years, trade protectionism is now a legitimate political choice. That’s a good thing.
Prince Harry: I was ‘singled out’ in security row
The monarch of Montecito is, er, back in the UK. Prince Harry has returned to Britain for a two-day hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in a last-ditch attempt to win automatic state-funded security for his family whenever they return to Britain. He may have stepped down as a working prince five years ago, but it seems the royal renegade is missing the perks…
The Duke of Sussex embarked on the 10,000-mile return trip from California in a bid to win back taxpayer-funded security arrangement for him and his wife, Meghan, and their children. The matter is thought to be a rather significant factor in Harry’s falling out with his father, with the Prince having made it clear in the past he thinks the King could intervene to help him out – although Buckingham Palace has insisted this is not quite accurate. How very interesting.
Today’s hearing comes after the Montecito monarch ‘comprehensively lost’ his legal fight with the Home Office early last year. The judge ruled at the time that the decision made by the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (Ravec) – that after quitting their royal duties the Sussexes were no longer entitled to the same personal security they had been used to – was not procedurally unfair. Yet some months later, Harry was able to challenge the judgement after the Court of Appeal concluded there was a ‘real prospect of success’ in his pushback against Ravec – and today the Prince’s legal team has raged that he was ‘singled out for different, unjustified and inferior treatment’ over the whole thing. Good heavens…
It’s not been a good year for Harry, whose African organisation Sentebale is currently being probed by the charity watchdog over ‘concerns raised’ about bullying and mismanagement. The investigation comes after the monarch and his trustees stepped down after a falling out over funding with the company’s chair. And just last month the Duke of Sussex came under more scrutiny when a US think tank suggested he may have lied about drug use in his US immigration files – prompting a decision to unseal the documents to check. He’s certainly not seen many wins lately – but the royal rebel will hoping that that all changes this week. Watch this space…
The cringeworthiness of showing Adolescence in schools
It’s not even a month since Adolescence ‘dropped’ on to Netflix and into all our lives, whether we actually watched it or not. The mania about the thing is still raging like a persistent brush fire, with the Prime Minister – apparently still unsure whether it’s a drama or a documentary – meeting its makers in Downing Street, and a lot of other politicians and public figures pulling very concerned faces about the internet, the manosphere, toxic masculinity etc.
Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for getting this (adult-certificated) show into schools for the instruction of children is very revealing, I think. It is, he tells us in his special language of searing fudge, ‘a torch that shines intensely brightly on a combination of issues that many people don’t know how to respond to’.
Put on the spot by the show’s creators, who advocate banning smartphones in schools, Starmer seems to have an agenda slightly different from theirs. ‘Personally,’ he told the BBC, ‘I would much rather we focus on what I think is the real issue, which is, whether you’re at school or elsewhere, what are you actually accessing? Because that, for me, is the critical issue. And whether it’s at school or elsewhere, there’s material that clearly shouldn’t be accessed.’
It shone an intensely bright light, then, on what he already thought before he watched it – censorship of the internet, and everyone ‘accessing’ only what he thinks they should be accessing.
But it’s Starmer’s repeated, enthusiastic support for Adolescence to be shown in schools that intrigues me here. What does he think this would achieve?
Netflix itself has teamed up with an NGO called Tender – specialists in ‘healthy relationships education’ – to get the show into schools. Its CEO, Susie McDonald MBE, has issued a statement beginning with the corking opening line, ‘Adolescence might be fiction, but it tells a very real story.’ Well no, it isn’t a real story, or even a very real story. She continues, ‘As specialists in relationships education, Tender is committed to supporting schools, young people and parents/carers with the resources to continue this vital conversation.’
We never stop having ‘vital’ conversations. The national curriculum contains strict guidelines about compulsory PHSE (personal, social, health and economic education) lessons, which are often outsourced to visiting busybodies like Tender.
You’d think by now somebody somewhere might be wondering why it is apparently necessary to instruct children in the basics of life, and why the process isn’t quite succeeding in socialising legions of well-balanced young individuals.
For Starmer and most of the rest of the political class, ‘vital conversations’ from ‘experts’ are how you deal with teenagers. Now, I have no contact whatsoever with teens today, but unless there’s been a total switch in their demeanour since I was a lad, they greet this kind of thing from adults with full-body cringe.
Visiting experts were less prevalent in the 1980s, though I have a vague memory of a community theatre group rocking up at school when I was 14 to raise our consciousness about the political situation in Nicaragua between the Contras and Sandinistas.
But teachers in general were always raising issues and trying to incite vital conversations. I can still hear the echo of the mass groans that erupted whenever there was an ‘issue-led’ assembly – oh God, what is it today? Shoplifting? Drugs? Spots? World war three? These excursions were welcomed, but only for their comedy value, and for the relief they provided from the grind of actual school work.
There was even an anonymous suggestion box put out, inciting requests for discussion topics in the class for what was then called ‘Human Relationships’. You can imagine how well that went.
‘Funky’ adults discussing issues were bum-clenchingly awkward and embarrassing. I shudder to recall the Grange Hill ‘Just Say No’ campaign, or Radio1’s Drug Alert – Bruno Brookes looking very Starmer-serious and tutting about heroin. Then there was the sheer gaucheness of using supposed ‘role models’ to demonstrate model behaviour – hey, Shakin’ Stevens says smoking isn’t cool, etc.
For Starmer and most of the rest of the political class, ‘vital conversations’ from ‘experts’ are how you deal with teenagers
Teens will always pick up on the stilted solemnity of adults purveying messages of social responsibility and good citizenship, and they have no qualms about expressing how funny it is. The more awkward and uncomfortable adults get, the more kids will laugh inappropriately. My generation bonded over the Blue Peter team’s hushed interactions with Joey Deacon, a severely disabled man. Teachers were horrified, but we weren’t laughing at Joey but at the way adults behaved around him.
Starmer and company must, surely, remember these things. Teenagers respond to clear rules, fairly enforced – so the evidently many-tiered, tongue-tied nonsense of the modern British state is unlikely to cut through to them, except as something deserving of their mockery.
They will see Starmer’s vacuous noodling about ‘conversations’ for the nonsense it is. Starmer himself knows it, hence his comment about ‘many people’ not knowing ‘how to respond’ to the ‘combination of issues’. Because what that actually means is that he doesn’t know how to respond.
He obviously can’t begin to confront the reality that violence among the young is a consequence of progressive policies initiated by people like him. So he passes it over to somebody else – because it’s time for yet another conversation.
The true purpose of King Charles’s Italy trip
After some recent bad news for King Charles in the form of an – admittedly fleeting – setback in his ongoing cancer treatment, you could hardly blame him for wanting a brief respite from the gruelling health challenges that he has faced. And respites don’t come more glamorous or enjoyable than the state visit that he and Queen Camilla are currently undertaking to Italy. It is appropriate that the trip coincides with their 20th wedding anniversary this week. The published itinerary suggests that fun, rather than onerous duty, will be the guiding spirit of the four days that they will be spending in Rome, Ravenna and other locations in the country.
Amidst the pasta and prosecco, there is another, less frivolous side to the King’s presence in Italy
There are, naturally, a few important and relevant state functions that the King will carry out during the visit – Charles has a meeting with the country’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and he will become the first British monarch to address a joint session in the Italian parliament. But, aside from that, a lot of what the King and Queen will be getting up to sounds like a glorious lark, to be enjoyed in, hopefully, radiant sunshine.
There will be whisky and parmesan tastings, visits to the Dante and Byron museums, a fly-past in the King’s honour and, to celebrate their actual anniversary tomorrow, a state banquet at the Italian President’s official residence of the Quirinale Palace in Rome. No wonder that the trip – Charles’s eighteenth visit to the country – has been described as demonstrating the royal pair’s ‘love for Italy and all things Italians cherish – culture, food, heritage’.
It does not sound very tiring, and, to be frank, it probably will not be. Only the most mean-spirited would begrudge the monarch a few relaxing days in one of the world’s greatest countries, and the no doubt glamorous images that will emerge from the trip will do nothing to damage Britain’s reputation for soft power.
Yet in the midst of global turmoil occasioned by Donald Trump’s sweeping imposition of tariffs, it is designed to serve another purpose rather than furthering the royal couple’s love of Italian food and heritage. As the British ambassador to Italy, Lord Llewellyn, stated:
Their Majesties will do something intangible but priceless: their visit will strengthen the closeness between our nations in a way that only they can, creating memories that will last a generation.
There are political considerations, too. While Meloni and Keir Starmer may not seem like natural soulmates, they have been forced together by both the war in Ukraine and, more recently, Trump’s apparent disdain for all things European. Lord Llewelyn’s remarks, therefore, that British defence ‘[is] closer than ever with Italy right now, which is vital in a changing Europe and as both our countries stand steadfast in our support for Ukraine’ and that ‘[our] relationship with Italy continues to strengthen as we reset our relationships with our European partner’” suggest that Charles’s presence is a diplomatic boon for both countries, rather than simply an exercise in la dolce vita.
The King has not been shy about offering not-so-tacit support for Ukraine and Zelensky. It would be surprising, then, if his meeting with Meloni did not include some lobbying on that country’s behalf.
It would be overstating the case to call this particular state visit gruelling or demanding. Yet amidst the pasta and prosecco, there is another, less frivolous side to the King’s presence in Italy, and Charles will be fully aware of the greater responsibilities that he faces. The trip will be fun, and few would suggest that it should not be. However, this most politically conscious of monarchs is seldom off duty, and we can only hope that the state visit sees him at his most relaxed – but also most engaged, too.
Tories lose major donor prompting HQ closure fears
Just as the House of Commons is about to rise for Easter recess, Her Majesty’s Official Opposition has been hit with some rather unfortunate news. As revealed by the Guardian, the Tories have lost one of their biggest donors – in a move that could, insiders believe, lead to the closure of the party’s headquarters in the north of England. Good heavens…
The paper heard from two Conservative sources that HomeServe founder Richard Harpin – who has donated £3.8 million to the party since 2008 and was ranked by the Electoral Commission as the Tories’ 10th biggest donor in 2023 – has now put a pause on his funding. It’s a significant loss to the party: the entrepreneur donated nearly £850,000 last year alone and former prime minister Rishi Sunak even used one of Harpin’s helicopters during the 2024 general election campaign. In recent years, the home repairs guru had been making a monthly £33,000 cash donation to the Tories, which covered the costs of its northern HQ in Leeds – and the pausing of these payments has prompted fears that the northern base will now close.
This is not the first sign that the party is facing financial difficulties. Ahead of the July poll, it emerged that John Caudwell, a longstanding billionaire Tory donor and founder of Phones4U, would endorse Labour instead. Just months after the Tories’ election defeat, Reform UK celebrated the defection of ex-Conservative funder Nick Candy to its ranks – with the luxury property developer promptly made chief fundraiser amid promises he would give a ‘seven-figure’ sum to Farage’s lot. Alright for some!
But despite donor losses, in the last three months of 2024 the Tories managed to raise nearly £2 million as Badenoch settled into the top job – double that pulled together by Sir Keir Starmer’s army and more than any other party. And although the party has lost out on Harpin’s contributions, a Tory source insisted to the Guardian that the party was expecting a strong next quarter of donations. It’s not all bad news, eh?
Is the ‘Office for Value for Money’ just another quango?
Who can possibly be against any attempt by any government of any political colour to get better value of money? After all, public sector productivity – which has been basically flat over the last 25 years despite all the advantages of new technology – is at heart a question of doing just that.
So we should all welcome that Rachel Reeves in her first budget set up the Office for Value for Money in the very heart of the Treasury. With its similar title to the Office for Budget Responsibility (which has of course been criticised for taking over responsibility for the budget), perhaps here at last would be a tough-minded approach to securing value for money from government spending. After all, this is a bureaucracy where spending on government credit cards quadrupled over the last four years, where one team spent £1,200 on luxury coffee pods in two months, and others spent nearly £2,500 at a shoe shop called Shoe Crush in Barbados. As The Spectator’s Project against Frivolous Funding (Spaff), found out, the government is buying e-bikes for jobseekers. There is plenty for this new OVfM to get stuck into.
So far, the Office for Value for Money has published just two terms of reference for studies which it will undertake ahead of the Spending Review later this year: one on ‘governance and budgeting arrangements for mega projects’, the other on ‘procuring short-term residential accommodation’. Both extremely worthy subjects to study, but it is difficult to see that these studies will be informed by urgency, or a single-minded determination to get to grips with undoubtedly real problems. Consider this bit on ‘governance and resourcing’ from the study on short-term residential accommodation:
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury will oversee the study at a ministerial level, supported by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.
A senior official group, with representatives from relevant departments, will oversee policy development and the recommendations to ministers. This study will be resourced by officials from the Office for Value for Money, the Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and HM Treasury, with input from the Cabinet Office and the Government Commercial Function.
The study will be informed by engagement with local authorities, the Local Government Association, the Centre for Homelessness Impact, and other relevant experts.
What could possibly go wrong?
Senior mandarins from a range of government departments are simply being asked to mark their own homework. Are we really going to get the same determined attitude which you would find in any successful private sector organisation which was seeking to identify and cut unnecessary expenditure? Is it really right tat the very people who have been responsible for the appalling public sector productivity problems of the last two decades are now suddenly going to discover the importance, not to mention the management skills, of getting true value for money in the public sector?
There is of course an alternative. Why not split both these studies in two and let one half be run by all these cross-departmental mandarins while the other half can be run by newly recruited professional managers from the private sector who have the experience and a successful track record of managing major projects? And to make things even more interesting, perhaps both parties could be invited to put forward their proposals for what percentage of the cost savings they should personally get in the event that they did actually achieve better value for money. One per cent of the savings made on cuts to the £834 billion currently being on mega projects in the UK is a lot of money.
Hamas has a history of using ambulances for war
Before the facts had even settled, western media outlets rendered their verdict: Israel was guilty. Guilty of deliberately targeting ambulances. Guilty of murdering humanitarian workers. Guilty because in the court of international opinion, Israel’s guilt is the default setting.
Only later did the complicated reality emerge. Israeli forces near Rafah, acting on intelligence that Hamas operatives were exploiting ambulances for military purposes, opened fire on a suspicious convoy. People were killed, including members of the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence. But rather than approach the incident with caution and historical awareness, media outlets like the New York Times and Sky News rushed to enshrine a narrative of Israeli barbarism – a narrative that ignores both the nature of the enemy Israel faces and the battlefield Hamas has deliberately created.
For decades, Palestinian terrorist groups have systematically turned ambulances, hospitals, schools and mosques into instruments of war. This is not a rare abuse but an entrenched tactic: a strategic manipulation of international law designed to endanger civilians and maximise propaganda victories. During the Second Intifada, suicide bombers were smuggled through Israeli checkpoints in ambulances. In one infamous 2002 case, a bomb belt was hidden beneath a stretcher carrying a sick child. Captured Hamas fighters have confessed to using ambulances for ferrying weapons and personnel. Senior Hamas leadership shelters inside hospitals, exploiting legal protections meant for civilians.
Initial IDF investigations indicate that intelligence detected suspicious movement in an area recently active with Hamas convoys. It says six of the 15 killed were Hamas operatives. The accusation that Israel acts with wanton cruelty – striking ambulances for sport – is not just false, it is a profound inversion of moral reality. It is not the IDF that violates the sanctity of humanitarian symbols; it is Hamas, systematically destroying that trust, turning every ambulance into a potential weapon and every rescue worker into an unwitting shield.
The Fourth Geneva Convention protects medical transports and facilities – but that protection is conditional. When hospitals become command centres and ambulances become troop carriers, the immunity is forfeited by those who abuse it. No nation, under existential threat from enemies who have turned humanitarian infrastructure into a battlefield, could operate under a policy of blind trust. Israel’s soldiers must act in a reality where every ambulance could hide explosives, every hospital could shelter terrorists. Ignoring this reality is not just naïve – it is deeply immoral.
In Rafah, IDF forces engaged a convoy under conditions of extreme ambiguity
The media’s unwillingness to grapple with this reality – its eagerness to frame Israel as a pariah state while ignoring the profound legal and moral violations of its adversaries – is not an innocent error. It sustains the very cycle of violence it claims to lament. It emboldens those for whom civilian suffering is not a tragic cost but a deliberate weapon. It contributes directly to the perverse incentive structure whereby Palestinian armed groups are rewarded — politically and diplomatically — for placing civilians and humanitarian workers in the line of fire.
In Rafah, IDF forces engaged a convoy under conditions of extreme ambiguity, in a known combat zone, against an enemy that routinely hides behind humanitarian cover. Yet western media has stripped away all complexity, portraying Israel as gratuitously violent while erasing Palestinian violations of the laws of war.
Until the media holds Israel’s adversaries to the same moral standards it so eagerly imposes on Israel, it will not serve as a guardian of truth, but as an active participant in the cycle of violence it claims to condemn.
Trump is tearing up the Old World Order – as promised
Seems there is a bit of ruckus on the stock markets of the largest capitalist country in the world, the one with deepest of all capital markets. Donald Trump has decided to lay waste to the globalised, market-based world trading order, and return to the protectionist state of affairs that served the nation so well in the 1930s.
It would be foolish of me to join the army of talented prognosticators predicting a recession, unless it doesn’t happen, and the even braver ones who can see just how much each company’s earnings will be affected by the New World Trading Order, if the earnings indeed are affected. We do know that some enterprises will benefit from a future cowering behind tariff walls and some will be hurt by the increase of prices on the 40 per cent of foreign goods they need to do whatever it is they do.
But there are a few things that even a cautious economist, one who has spent a good many decades leaving explicit forecasts to braver souls, can suggest. The first is that before joining the new recruits to the anti-Trump legions, we admit that he is on to something. The pre-‘Liberation Day’ world trading order was seriously tilted against America, especially since the day in 2001 when Bill Clinton engineered China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation.
Admission to a rules-enforcing international organisation was just what the Communist party needed to raise the country from abject poverty to world economic power. Its leaders sought entry, firm in the belief that rules are for fools. China subsidised its manufacturers with cheap capital and special privileges; helped itself to the intellectual capital lured to China by the hope of access to its huge market – a new generation of useful idiots; manipulated its currency to keep the price of its exports down. This enabled China’s leaders to deploy a cheap and submissive army of workers in the destruction of American firms and lay waste to the communities in which those firms were located. That eventually gave rise to J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a cry of pain at the consequences of the deindustrialisation of Middle America.
It took Trump to say ‘enough is enough’ to China and to other places such as the EU, with its 20 per cent tariff on American cars, ten times what America charged for cars made in the EU. For that he deserves full marks. The way he has decided to act on his understanding gets somewhat lower grades.
Investors have watched 20 per cent of their portfolios and pension-savings plans wiped out, with only a few sectors, most notably healthcare and retailers of consumer necessities, less hard hit. The hurt has become a new American export to Europe, the UK and elsewhere.
America’s builders are scrambling to raise the price and reduce the size of new homes, already unaffordable to other than high-earners, as the price of lumber, steel and concrete head up. Manufacturers of shoes, toys, apparel who thought they had purchased immunity from Trump tariffs by parking Chinese-made goods in warehouses in Vietnam for relabelling and trans-shipment to America are stunned to find that Trump is hunting those goods down, wherever they are, and hitting them with tariffs, as well he should, since this entire chain was conceived to deceive.
China is now the focus of Trump’s ire for having retaliated against his swingeing tariffs. Xi Jinping is determined not to lose face, and is preparing for a long war – trade war, only, we hope, rather than a diversionary thrust at Taiwan – that might shave as much as 2 percentage points off his target 5 per cent growth rate.
Calm reigns on a group of barren volcanic islands near Antarctica
Anticipation of a recession has caused major revisions in the demand for oil, sending crude oil prices tumbling and making oilmen (that is what they are still called) who followed Trump’s urging to ‘drill, baby, drill’ prepare to idle some drilling rigs absent a turnaround in prices. Farmers, hit by reciprocal tariffs from China, are lining up for subsidies to offset lost sales and price falls in crop prices, and the anticipated increase in the cost of everything from equipment to pesticides and fertilisers. But there is no balm in Cupertino, California, home of Apple, where chief executive and major-Trump contributor Tim Cook is faced with the prospect of flogging $3,500 iPhones when tariffs cut in.
The political effects of the market entering what is called ‘bear territory’ – a 20 per cent fall in prices – are unhappiness by pensioners and savers and, more importantly, what journalist Hunter S. Thompson would have called fear and loathing by big donors and Republican politicians. The big donors knew that Trump planned tariffs, but doubted he would wipe out parts of their portfolios and drive down the value of the companies they lead. Rises in chief executive compensation are often based on the increase in their company’s share price. Republican politicians are faced with irate constituents and, with mid-term elections around the corner – actually 18 months from now – are in what can only be described as a panic. Some want to take back the control of tariffs they once had but shifted to the president in 1977 as part of their flight from political accountability. That group does not have the votes needed to make the change.
But calm reigns on a group of barren volcanic islands near Antarctica. Due to a bit of sloppy staff work by a staff not renowned for its competence, and a president uninterested in harrowing detail, that island has been hit with a 10 per cent tariff. It is inhabited only by penguins, and they remain unflappable.
The crash is not as bad as it seems
It’s that moment of supreme uncertainty. We do however know the question. Is this a regular sell-off, with the S&P500 nudging into bear market territory, but then steadying in the next few months before a gradual recovery? Or is this a true crash, akin to those of October 1929, October 1987, October 2008, or most recently March 2020, in which case we are less than halfway down the peak?
The strategists have of course been crawling over the data of previous crashes, but the analogies never really fit. There has not been a trade war akin to what may be developing now since the 1930s, when the world economy was both less integrated and more fragile. The confident predictions of a couple of weeks ago that US equities would end up this year now look rather silly. Being clever doesn’t help.
We can however say two things. One is that sudden vicious crashes are rare. Longview Economics, a London-based consultancy, calculates that those four noted above are the only ones on that scale in the past 100 years. The other is that bear markets are totally normal. There are lots of them, 27 on the S&P500 index and its predecessors since 1923, with an average decline of 35 per cent. Unlike those sudden crashes, a classic bear market decline typically takes between nine and ten months, and they come through on average every three-and-a-half years. Hartford Funds has a handy tally here. If you accept that what’s happening is normal – that Donald Trump’s tariffs have simply triggered a decline that would probably have happened anyway – then figuring out what might happen becomes a little easier.
We also learnt something new yesterday about this current plunge. It was that any sort of softening of Donald Trump’s tariffs would check the crash, though not necessary stop a longer bear market decline. The sniff of a delay in the implementation of the tariffs was enough to push up prices for a few minutes, then when it became clear it was simply a rumour, markets duly flopped back.
There are four reasons why what we’re seeing in the market is not as bad as it seems:
- Whatever happens in the next few days, the overwhelming probability is that this will turn out to be a classic bear market lasting several months, with equities falling by at least another 10 per cent. The reason: the market was over-priced and it was simply a question of what would trigger the fall.
- The tariff war will have an outcome, in the sense that it won’t rumble on for years. We are talking a few months before an accommodation with the US’s major trading partners is secured.
- There are a couple of helpful analogies. One is the dot-com bubble. The overvaluation of high-tech America now is not as serious as in 2000. The other is the banking crash of 2008. This is, or at least may develop into, a trade crash. But trade disruption is easier to fix than banking disruption. Commerce is more resilient than finance.
- If those three points are more or less right, then while the next few months will be difficult, the overall loss of global output will be less serious than the recessions what followed the dot-com bubble and the banking crash. There may or may not be a US or European recession, but they won’t be serious ones unless there is some further negative event. We are looking at a mid-cycle pause in global growth, not the end of the expansion period.
We are looking at a mid-cycle pause in global growth, not the end of the expansion period
There is, however, one overarching concern. It’s the financial fragility of the US – the size of the fiscal deficit and the reliance on the rest of the world to be prepared to hold yet more US treasury debt to fund it. The destruction of wealth that has taken place over the past few days is huge. A month ago three of the ‘magnificent seven’ – Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia – were all worth more than $3 trillion. Now, none of them are.
Also, until yesterday the yield on US treasury notes was falling, with 10-year Treasury notes trading below 4 per cent overnight. Then during the course of the day yields climbed to 4.2 per cent. That’s still way down from 4.8 per cent in mid-January, when Treasuries were helped by expectations of further cuts in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, but Monday was a nasty time for bond holders. So while the broad picture is that international investors have been prepared to carry on financing the US deficit, despite their countries being attacked by tariffs, you have to ask whether they will continue to do so.
Final thought. We are seeing a well-known market phenomenon unfold. Everything takes longer to happen than anyone expects, then when it does come, it always does so more violently. Remember the interchange in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises?
‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked.
‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’
The punishment of Lucy Connolly
The shocking case of Lucy Connolly is becoming a cause célèbre. In October, the Northampton childminder and wife of a Tory councillor received 31 months behind bars for stirring up racial hatred for a tweet on the night of the Southport massacre. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, now says her sentence was ‘excessive’ and that she is the victim of a ‘politicised two-tier justice system’; former PM Liz Truss wants her ‘released immediately’. With the White House already putting pressure on the UK over free-speech concerns, that the case has now reached Elon Musk will surely be setting nerves jangling in Downing Street.
The new attention comes after an article over the weekend by the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson on Connolly’s case. In Pearson’s telling, Lucy Connolly comes across as a loving mother and wife and a beloved childminder (to a very racially diverse group of charges, for what it’s worth). She has also suffered tragedy. In 2011, the Connollys lost their firstborn, Harry, aged just 19 months, after poor NHS care, a trauma for which Lucy received a diagnosis of PTSD and from which she never fully recovered.
It was this experience of losing a child that made her distress on the night of the Southport murders especially acute. She tweeted:
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’ After this rash and ugly tweet, she took the dog out for a walk, mulled it over and later deleted her message. But the post had been screenshotted, and soon she had been arrested for stirring up racial hatred.
‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this’, she says, ‘their intention was always to hammer me’. So it proves. She received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her child. After she expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’.
Several legal professionals consider her 31-month sentence inordinately harsh, and we have learned about the effect her imprisonment is having on her family. In the absence of her mother, her daughter has started having behavioural issues at school. Her husband, Ray, who is ill, does his best, but is no substitute for Lucy.
Crueller still, Connolly is being denied release on temporary licence, even while it’s granted to fellow inmates convicted of more serious crimes. A low risk to the community and a primary carer to her child, Lucy ought to be a prime candidate for this normal step in the rehabilitation process. But Lucy claims that a prison official told her probation officer she wouldn’t get let out with a tag ‘because of press and public perception’. ‘The whole system is corrupt’, she says.
Still, blaming the system as a whole here strikes me as rather too charitable to those most responsible for what has happened to Connolly and others like her. Because the injustice that has followed the Southport unrest was no inevitability nor an accident: it stemmed from deliberate political choices.
In the most crucial part of the exposé, Connolly says she was influenced to plead guilty as a result of being held on remand. Behind bars, struggling to speak to a solicitor and with a trial date potentially months away, Lucy became panicked and demoralised. ‘A guilty plea looked like the fastest way to put this nightmare behind her’, explains Pearson. She pleaded guilty in the knowledge she would get a discount on her sentence, expecting to be out by Christmas.
In fact, having spoken to barristers, Ray Connolly was convinced that no jury would convict Lucy for a single horrible tweet. Indeed, this contention has been borne out by other speech cases following Southport that have come to trial. In October, former prison officer Mark Heath successfully argued that in his series of anti-immigration social media posts he simply was expressing his ‘strong views’, and was found not guilty of stirring up racial hatred. As for former Royal Marine Jamie Michael, in February the jury took such a dim view of the prosecution of this mild-mannered veteran over a YouTube video that they returned a not guilty verdict in just 17 minutes. Behind bars, however, Connolly never got to hear that she stood a strong chance of being found not guilty should she face a jury of her peers.
So the question one has to ask is: why was she not granted bail? After all, this was anything but normal practice. Lucy was not a danger to the community. She was certainly not going to offend again, utterly shocked by the experience and having in any case deleted her Twitter account. And this was a first offence by a respected childminder of good character.
But judges were refusing almost all bail applications connected to Southport, following explicit political direction from the top. Early in the disorder, a flinty-faced Sir Keir Starmer had told the nation: ‘The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow. And convictions will follow.’
Politics also came to influence the justice system through the widely repeated claim that the unrest had been caused principally by disinformation on social media – ‘whipped up online’, in Starmer’s words. This claim has always been dubious at best, there being plenty of offline reasons for public anger. Indeed, arguably it was the authorities’ information vacuum about the Southport suspect that sparked so much mistrust, as the government’s terrorism adviser, Jonathan Hall KC, has recently said. This face-saving narrative about disinformation may well have pushed the justice system to come down harshly on online speech. The judge who sentenced 23-year-old care worker Cameron Bell – held on remand for a TikTok livestream in which she referred to migrants as ‘tramps’ – made this abundantly clear, saying: ‘The violence was fuelled by misinformation and misplaced far-right sentiment.’ In sentencing Connolly, Judge Melbourne Inman likewise drew a link between ‘social media’ and violence on the streets.
Further heightening the zeal of the state response was Starmer’s repeated claim that the unrest was the work of an organised ‘far-right’, a ‘tiny, mindless minority’ who had arrived from out of town to exploit the situation. In fact, the majority of those arrested were locals, as later analysis of the arrest data by both the Telegraph and the Guardian has found. Misleading as it was, this narrative served to aggressively politicise the unrest. In this telling, those involved were not fellow citizens distraught at a tragedy – who might therefore be treated even-handedly – they were enemies within, to be crushed. Judge Inman made the political nature of Lucy Connolly’s case clear when he admonished her from the bench that ‘It is [a] strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive’.
You don’t have to take my word for it that the Labour government is responsible for the state crackdown post-Southport – just take Starmer’s. ‘Crime has consequences’, he boasted in his rose garden speech near the end of August, adding, ‘I won’t tolerate a breakdown in law and order under any circumstances’. But if the prime minister can take personal credit for the Southport response, he must accept personal blame for the plight of its victims. Which means Lucy Connolly remains in prison for a tweet – her 12-year-old daughter without a mother, her sick husband without a carer. Two-tier Keir should not be allowed to forget it.
Canada is more conservative than politicians think
Finally, some good news for Canada’s Conservative party. For the first time since the federal election was announced, a poll last week showed them in the lead, and polls over the weekend show them closing in on the Liberal party. They’re not where they were, but it’s progress.
In early January, the much-loathed Trudeau was stepping down, both Liberals and the New Democrats were highly unpopular, and the Conservatives, with a no-nonsense economic platform were considered a shoo-in for the next election.
But thanks to Canada-US tensions over border security and tariffs, Liberals have been topping every poll since the beginning of the election campaign. The Conservative’s Pierre Poilievre is staying steadfastly on message, but doesn’t seem to be generating the same enthusiasm.
His improvement in the polls is likely due to two things – a measure of relief from American pressure, as Trump’s laser beam swings away from Canada towards the rest of the world – and Poilievre’s very slight shift towards social issues, which he has scarcely mentioned since the beginning of the election campaign. Poilievre is widely perceived to be strong on economics. It seems voters though need to know he’s not just a clever financial analyst, but a leader of character with a well-formed moral sense.
In British Columbia this weekend, Poilievre addressed the drug crisis, pointing out that B.C. is ‘probably the worst place for fentanyl overdoses in the world.’ He spoke out against Liberal safe drug consumption policies, which he has previously called ‘insane’ and promised that a Conservative government would redirect funds to treatment and recovery programmes. On April 2, he said his government would promote scientific research at universities at the expense of radical political ideologies. And on March 31, he mentioned families who would like to have children – although while talking about housing affordability. It was notable though that he actually mentioned the people no one is allowed to talk about in Canada: normal families who want children.
Outrage ensued, of course. It’s okay, in Canadian politics, to talk about abnormal situations all day long, and what people in those situations might want. But talking about normal families and their normal desire for children? That’s a no-no for progressives. And they want to keep it that way.
It’s the old lefty trick: make Conservatives apologise for being conservative. And it’s worked very well in the past. Received wisdom in Canadian politics, upheld unanimously by left-wing gatekeepers, is that socially conservative stances don’t make it past the ballot box.
But received wisdom, in this case, is bunk. Why does Canada have abysmal voter turnout? Not because voters love social progressivism. No, they stay home because they think no politician is worth crossing the street for. They think it doesn’t matter who is in charge – new boss, same depressing dreck. If Poilievre is different, he needs to find a way to let them know.
Conservatively inclined voters saw former opposition leader Andrew Scheer – well known to hold pro-life views – promise not to let his conscience interfere with his politics, and they thought, ‘That’s a bit shifty.’ They saw his successor Erin O’Toole back every progressive policy in the book, and they thought, ‘He’s desperate to get elected.’
There’s a saying in Canadian politics that Conservatives always spend their campaigns trying to prove they can run a Liberal government better than the Liberals can. But here’s a novel idea: why run a Liberal government at all?
Poilievre has done a good job on economic issues, but it’s time for him to step up his game and present a socially compelling vision that speaks to the silent, normal majority.
If all you did is listen to Canada’s state-subsidised media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that every Canadian wants the place to be a woke hellhole. But they don’t. The truckers’ convoy was mainly a conservative working-class movement. The March for Life is an annual pro-life event. The Million March 4 Children is a conservative parents’ movement against inappropriate material in schools. June school walkouts are growing from one year to the next. These events receive only negative press, if any. Yet they continue in the face of opposition, and they grow. That speaks to a strong desire for a social vision that protects normal family life.
Fringe elements, some will say. But consider that Canada has some of the most aggressive anti-hate laws in the world, and an activist judiciary to back it up. Many Canadians don’t speak out on matters of burning importance to them, for fear of consequences: losing their jobs, being ostracised by friends and family, maybe even getting sued by a well-heeled activist group. The few that do speak out are the tip of the iceberg.
Poilievre has an opportunity here to present himself to Canadians, not just as a political strategist, but as a leader of character, sincerity, and goodwill. Though he was raised Catholic, he has distanced himself from socially conservative stances on pro-life issues and traditional marriage. This was a mistake, and not just for moral reasons. A Canadian Conservative who makes a public point of being pro-choice, is showing fear – and everyone knows it.
But though Poilievre may not have everything figured out yet, it’s not too late for him to begin engaging seriously with socially conservative principles. Here’s a straightforward place to start, even in the middle of an election campaign: what’s best for Canadian children? They are, quite literally, Canadian society’s only hope of survival. And all the research agrees: what’s best for children is to grow up with their own mother and father in a traditional family setting.
Defence of the traditional family is a battlefield, all right. But if Poilievre steps into the fray, he’ll find unexpected supporters flowing in from all sides. Liberals aren’t going to vote for him. He should make friends with the people who might.
The end of the pick ’n’ mix passport
The second passport used to be a backdoor: a legal hack for the well-advised, well-connected or well-heeled. You could acquire nationality in a country you’d hardly visited, without necessarily even speaking the language, and still find yourself welcomed with open arms – or at least waved through the fast-track lane at immigration. But that game is ending. More and more governments are closing the door on tenuous ancestral claims and pay-to-play citizenship. Whether through lineage or liquid assets, the old tricks to get a second passport no longer work. Nationality is being redefined – not as a loophole, but as a bond.
The appeal of a second passport has always been practical. For Britons, Brexit turned the post-Brexit navy passport into a travel straitjacket. The right to live or work across the EU vanished overnight. Meanwhile, the wealthy from countries such as India, Nigeria, Russia, China or Pakistan – stuck with passports that require visas for nearly everything – turned to Caribbean citizenships as a shortcut to global mobility. The point wasn’t loyalty to a country; it was access. Jonathan Miller, writing in this magazine, ditched his ‘useless’ British passport for an Irish one, largely because it opened more doors. For the past few decades, a passport has been less a marker of belonging than a laminated signal of status. Some treat theirs like a badge of prestige. Others collect them – I have a friend with four passports. Convenience trumped identity.
Italy has had enough. From now on, only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy can claim citizenship by descent. Until earlier this year, the rules were absurdly loose – anyone could apply for an Italian passport who could prove descent from an ancestor going all the way back to Italian unification in 1861. In South America, entire businesses sprang up to manufacture Italian citizens by the busload. Italian consulates were overwhelmed, choking on the paperwork. Between 2014 and 2024, nearly 1.8 million people living outside Italy received Italian passports, most of whom had no language, cultural or geographic connection to the country. Calling time last month on the farce, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that applying for an Italian passport is ‘not a game […] that allows you to go shopping in Miami’.
The modern passport is a bureaucratic descendant of something far older – a letter of safe passage from one city-state to another, vouching for the bearer’s decency and good conduct. The British passport still carries a faint echo of that tradition. It requests, in the name of His Majesty, that the bearer be allowed to ‘pass freely without let or hindrance’ and be given ‘such assistance and protection as may be necessary’. Somewhere between Renaissance Italy and the Schengen zone, that dignity was lost – replaced by biometric scans, visa quotas and, until recently, chequebook citizenship. At the outer fringe, novelty services now offer to print up passports for entirely imaginary countries – complete with your chosen flag, title and national motto. For the right fee, anyone can be a prince of nowhere.
Italy’s decision to tighten the rules is part of a broader trend. The once-popular golden passport schemes, which allowed the wealthy to purchase citizenship, are facing scrutiny. The OECD has warned about the risks of ‘identity laundering’ through these schemes, where individuals acquire new passports to conceal their origin or bypass financial transparency rules. Malta’s Individual Investor Programme, which allows anyone prepared to invest €750,000 and spend 12 months in Malta to become the proud owner of a brand-new EU passport, has faced criticism from the European Commission over concerns of money laundering and corruption. Despite revising the programme with higher investment thresholds, Malta has now suspended applications from certain countries. Pressure is building for them to drop the programme entirely.
Cyprus terminated its Cyprus Investment Programme in 2020 following reports that passports were handed to individuals who failed to meet the necessary criteria, including some with criminal records. This led to the indictment of several high-profile politicians and highlighted the potential for abuse in such schemes.
For the past few decades, a passport has been less a marker of belonging than a laminated signal of status
The Caribbean nations, long known for their citizenship-by-investment programmes, are also under pressure and have been tightening their policies. Grenada, for example, introduced a ‘citizenship by invitation’ initiative, selectively inviting only a limited number of ‘hand-picked’ investors who can contribute ‘significant entrepreneurial innovation’, marking a departure from open-door policies whereby they simply gave a passport to anyone who came along with enough money. Meanwhile, the European Union revoked Vanuatu’s visa-free access to the Schengen area over inadequate background checks.
Even countries such as Portugal and Ireland, which offered golden visa programmes granting residency to investors with a pathway to citizenship, are now backing away. Portugal’s programme has encountered significant processing backlogs, with nearly 900,000 immigration cases pending as of early 2025, leading to delays and legal challenges from applicants. Ireland, meanwhile, terminated its Immigrant Investor Programme in 2023, reflecting a shift towards more stringent immigration policies. Much of the investment in Ireland under the programme came from China.
This tightening of citizenship laws is not confined to investment schemes. Countries are also revising residency requirements to qualify for naturalisation. In January, Sweden proposed extending the minimum residence requirement for citizenship from five to eight years, alongside the requirement for applicants to demonstrate an ‘honest way of life’ and financial self-sufficiency. Denmark and Finland have announced similar measures, emphasising integration and genuine connection to the country.
For years, citizenship has been sold like a designer handbag. A Caribbean passport offered visa-free access to Europe. An Italian great-grandparent opened a backdoor into the EU. A few million euros could turn a Russian oligarch into a proud Maltese patriot. But the loopholes are closing. Governments are reasserting control. Nationality is being reclaimed not as a commodity, but as a connection. The message is clear: citizenship is not a lifestyle choice. It’s a bond – and bonds are earned.
The egg shortage is coming to Europe
President Trump swerved in his ‘Liberation Day’ event last week, speaking on an issue that has preoccupied America for months: the price of eggs. Trump said: ‘The first week I was blamed for eggs, I said, “I just got here”. The price on eggs now is down 55 per cent and will keep going down. They were saying that for Easter, “Please don’t use eggs. Could you use plastic eggs?” I say, we don’t want to do that.’
Like him or not, Trump has a way of understanding the zeitgeist. The egg crisis is threatening to become global. It has displaced even Marine Le Pen as a subject of discussion at my village café. There was not a single carton of eggs on sale yesterday when I did my shopping at the Super U. How will I make my bacon and eggs? How will Mrs Miller make her Hollandaise sauce?
The scarcity is ostensibly because of bird flu but is fuelled by hoarding. The dynamic is similar to that which drove the scarcity of toilet paper during the pandemic. Although this is not the place to delve into the existential symbology of loo rolls.
The egg holds its own profound religious and semiotic significance, symbolising life and transformation. In Christianity, the egg is central to the celebration of Easter, symbolising Jesus Christ’s resurrection. We hide eggs and set children to hunt them. So we have been preparing for this moment of hard-to-find eggs all our lives. In the Passover Seder, a hard-boiled egg (beitzah) on the Seder plate symbolises the sacrifice offered at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Before Christianity, eggs were tied to spring festivals celebrating fertility and rebirth. Ancient peoples, including the Persians and Egyptians, exchanged eggs during equinox rituals.
In consumer culture, eggs signify nutrition and simplicity (e.g. ‘the incredible, edible egg’ advertising campaign), yet their recent scarcity and price volatility turns them into economic barometers with political significance, layering secular meaning onto sacred roots. My local supermarket normally has shelves of eggs. Bio eggs. Free-range eggs. Extra-large eggs. Ordinary eggs. But there are none at all now, and this is apparently happening all over the country. Self-sufficiency is the obvious answer.
The trend of raising chickens has surged among the famous. King Charles has a grand 17ft-high hen house at Highgrove dubbed ‘Cluckingham Palace’. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry maintain ‘Archie’s Chick Inn’ at their Montecito home. Tech bro Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and husband of Serena Williams, raises four hens with their daughter, Olympia, who named them Bum Bum, Chickaletta, Minnie and Daisy. ‘Crazy chicken lady’ Tori Spelling has reinvented herself as a ‘chicken whisperer’ and keeps heritage breeds like Silkies (her hen Coco was once mistaken for a poodle). She’s designed outfits for them, including ponchos. The barrister Jolyon Maugham famously killed a fox with a baseball bat while wearing a kimono, defending his hens in central London.
Here in France, I have secured a private supply of eggs. I have a man
Hens cost between £15 and £40 each and housing them in suitable accommodation may not be practical for all. Chicken coops start at a couple of hundred pounds, assembly required, although there’s no upper limit if you wish to house your hens in palatial conditions. Baseball bats are available from Amazon. In Britain all hen keepers – even those with just one bird – must register with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), with non-compliance now a criminal offence carrying fines or up to six months in prison under the Avian Influenza (Preventive Measures) Regulations. Similar regulations are on the way in the EU.
Here in France, I have secured a private supply of eggs. I have a man. It’s not quite like Lou Reed, up to Lexington, $26 in his hand scoring dope, but not entirely dissimilar. Private arrangements become necessary in these times. A very ancient neighbour who remembers rationing tells me that during the Occupation, sugar and olive oil were the key commodities on the black market. So perhaps I should be stockpiling those, too. I pride myself on my French but when I recently asked a waitress at a hotel in Paris for an œuf à la coque, she brought me a Coke, so I hope I can navigate this new crisis without too much dérangement.
Is today’s TV British enough?
There is a decent chance that most Spectator readers have seen at least one of the following: the much-ballyhooed Adolescence, the rather less controversial Black Doves, and the once-magnificent, latterly tawdry The Crown. From the travails of royalty to the horrors of a child killer, via the acrobatic derring-do of unusually witty spies, these shows include some of the greatest British actors working today. They are all quintessentially English in their settings. All three have been hugely successful and should, by rights, be programmes that the British television industry should be extremely proud of.
Except, of course, they’re not British. Well, not wholly, anyway. Despite their Anglophile content, all three were produced by Netflix and streamed by the wholly American-owned company. They may be filled with and filmed by British talent, but it’s dollars, not pounds, that have enabled them to exist.
There are growing suggestions, culminating this week in a report from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, that ‘distinctly British programming’ is facing a crisis. Despite around half of TV workers being out of work at the moment, a huge amount of interesting stuff being made; in addition to the shows mentioned above, everything from the peerless Slow Horses to The Day of the Jackal features British talent across the board. But if you’re looking for original and distinctive drama on today’s BBC, forget it. It says a lot about the industry that the last bona fide hit that was truly home-grown, the excellent Line of Duty, still attracts fervent speculation as to the possibility of another season.
British television was once the envy of the broadcasting world. From Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown to Pride and Prejudice and Our Friends in the North, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all managed to make superb television that was internationally successful and said something original about Britain and Britishness (often in unpredictable and often unflattering ways – nobody could watch the hugely popular Boys from the Blackstuff, for instance, and think that it was some sort of cosy heritage drama). Despite this popularity, if you’re in British TV and can’t get work on Netflix or Amazon Prime funded shows, there’s increasingly little out there for you.
If Pride and Prejudice were made today, whether by the BBC or Netflix, it would almost certainly have to address issues of diversity and gender to be commissioned. One could easily imagine a mixed-race Lizzie Bennet, an overtly gay Mr Collins, and all the rest. There are those who would suggest that this makes it more ‘relevant’, and they may well be right. However, such tweaks and changes are unlikely to make it better. Just look to the latest Hollywood flop, Snow White, to see what happens when studios focus on politics rather than entertainment. The reason why the original Pride and Prejudice worked so well (and it should be noted that Jennifer Ehle, who played Lizzie, is in fact American, rather than the quintessential English rose she was taken for) was because it was executed with complete conviction in the source material. It seems almost quaint now to think of the uproar when Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy appeared in a wet shirt. Today, he would undoubtedly be naked – and probably in the embrace of another man.
They may be filled with and filmed by British talent, but it’s dollars, not pounds, that have enabled them to exist
There will be pressure on the government this week to increase funding for film and television from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This funding, they argue, should not take the current form of encouraging UK-based big-budget productions like Star Wars and Mission: Impossible via generous tax credits. Instead, the aim should be to invest directly in home-grown talent. This is a sensible idea. Yet the reasons The Crown ended up on Netflix rather than at its natural home of the BBC is because of far higher budgets and considerably less editorial oversight. (Can you imagine a BBC incarnation of the show including a scene in which William asks Prince Charles if he had his mother murdered, as The Crown’s sixth series does?)
The idea of encouraging quintessentially British content is seductive, but I fear largely empty. Netflix and the other streaming services are not going anywhere, and unless the government does something stupid such as blocking access to their shows, they will continue to offer better-funded competition for the average viewer – even if this does have the knock-on effect of limiting UK talent. What terrestrial services need to do instead is focus on building on their traditional strengths: finding brilliant talent and nurturing it without worrying obsessively about box-ticking at every turn. If they can’t do that, then this is a David v. Goliath fight where there can only be one winner – and it isn’t the Biblical victor.
Are Reeves’s fiscal rules really ‘ironclad’?
This afternoon, Keir Starmer recommitted to not raising income tax, VAT or employee National Insurance for the duration of this parliament. At the same time, he reiterated his support for Rachel Reeves’s ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. Are both possible?
Answering a question from GB News’s Chris Hope at a visit to the Jaguar Land Rover factory in the West Midlands the Prime Minister said: ‘We made that commitment in the manifesto and we were absolutely clear about it going into the Budget and the Spring Statement, and that is a commitment we’ve made and a commitment we will keep.’
In response to an earlier question from Sky, he also stood by the Chancellor’s fiscal rules: ‘So, the reaction to the challenges of the last few days is not for us to say, well, the first thing we’ll now do is to put on one side our fiscal rules it is to remind people why we put them in place in the first place, which is to create the certainty that we need.’
But the main ‘ironclad’ fiscal rule – to have the current budget in surplus in five years time – is already under serious pressure. With only £9.9 billion of headroom against that rule as of last month’s Spring Statement, any economic turbulence could render it unachievable. If that modest cushion has already been wiped out, the only options left are tax rises or spending cuts.
When the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) scored Reeves’s Spring Statement, they did so while modelling several risk scenarios. On tariffs, for example, they outlined three broad possibilities:
- The US increases tariffs levied on goods arriving from China, Canada and Mexico by 20 percentage points, and these countries retaliate equivalently
- The US goes further by increasing tariffs on goods arriving from all other countries, including the UK, by 20 percentage points
- In addition to the above, all US trading partners, including the UK, retaliate against the US by imposing their own equivalent tariffs on US goods
Whilst Britain – thanks to its balanced goods trade with America – avoided joining the 20 per cent club, the scenario that seems most close to reality is the second one. And as more countries consider retaliation, we may be drifting toward the third.
But let’s say something close to scenario two comes to pass. According to the OBR’s modelling, GDP is 0.6 percentage points lower than in the forecast Chancellor has based her plans on. Inflation is higher than assumed and unemployment is up too. The result: in the words of the OBR this will ‘reduce the current surplus in the target year to almost zero’ (by almost zero they mean the headroom is £300 million – or 0.0 per cent of GDP). In other words her headroom is within a rounding error of being wiped out entirely and her fiscal rule broken.
Starmer’s way around the intractable problem of not raising taxes or abandoning the fiscal rules remains growth: ‘Because the first lever can’t be more taxes. My strong belief is that we have to grow our economy, create the conditions for our economy which we have done, there’s been record investment coming into our economy.’
But every day this tariff standoff drags on, growth prospects look gloomier. In the past few days Barclays and KPMG both downgraded their UK forecasts. Oxford Economics followed suit. And for Reeves’s growth-driven optimism to hold up, the OBR’s often too-rosey assumptions would need to be even more inaccurate than usual.
So with each new market jolt, Reeves’s slim margin erodes further. If the numbers deteriorate as expected, she’ll be left with a three-way choice: raise taxes, cut spending, or abandon her fiscal rules. Starmer appears to have ruled out the first and last options today.
Will he be eating his words come the autumn?
What the Southport Inquiry needs to do
The Southport killings were horrific, but should they have happened at all? We already know that the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent, failed to identify the risk Axel Rudakubana posed. That’s a key question which the Southport Inquiry, the first stage of which began on Monday, aims to answer.
The Home Office has said that the inquiry will ‘leave no stone unturned in uncovering how this attack happened and to not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure’. To that end the Southport Inquiry is to be ‘statutory’, meaning it will be able to compel witnesses to attend and give evidence under oath, require the production of documents and other evidence and hold its hearings in public.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, intends that the inquiry ‘will provide insights into any failings that allowed a young man with a previous history of violence, to commit this horrendous attack’. This is crucial. Unlike the fiction of Adolescence, Axel Rudakubana’s crime followed an escalating sequence of violent and disturbing behaviour. Many public bodies were aware of this. And yet no one stopped him. The inquiry must discover why.
The Home Secretary has made an excellent choice in Sir Adrian Fulford to chair the inquiry. He was Vice-President of the Court of Appeal, the first Investigatory Powers Commissioner and sentenced Wayne Couzens. He’s also seen as someone who will cut through efforts to obscure blame or shirk responsibility.
This is likely to be necessary. As we saw in the Prevent ‘learning review’ there’s a culture of avoiding blame in many of our public bodies. The inquiry’s terms of reference give its chair very broad powers. Fulford may ‘examine all evidence’ he deems appropriate, but it is expected he will examine the actions of Merseyside and Lancashire Police, six government departments, MI5, the local council and the NHS. First of all though, he intends to meet with the victims and their families, and this is also to be welcomed. As the Home Secretary said, ‘Southport was an unimaginable tragedy…we owe it to [the] families, and all those affected…to quickly understand what went wrong’. She’s right. Let’s hope Fulford lives up to his reputation and establishes whether Rudakubana could have been stopped, and what must be done differently in the future.
Fulford will need to move quickly. He is expected to provide a final report on this phase by early 2026 at the latest. After that will come phase two, which is ‘expected to consider the adequacy of multi-agency systems to address the risk posed by young people whose fixation or obsession with, and desire to commit, acts of extreme violence presents a significant risk to public safety.’ Again this is welcome. Risk management policy informed by real events must be preferable to that driven by TV drama.
This all serves to demonstrate that the government can move quickly to establish an effective, statutory inquiry when it wishes to. In this context it seems strange that Tom Crowther KC, the lawyer tasked with developing local inquiries into child sexual abuse grooming gangs, has heard so little that he had to ask the Home Office whether they still need him. If Rudakubana’s victims deserve a serious, statutory inquiry, then those hundreds of girls abused across the country absolutely do.
Trump hits back at China’s retaliatory tariffs
Stock markets around the world continue to plummet but Donald Trump has his mind on other matters: his tariff war with China. The American president has this afternoon hit back at Beijing’s announcement on Friday that it would impose retaliatory tariffs of 34 per cent on US goods following Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ levies last week. Unleashing a fiery tirade on Truth Social today, Trump has fumed that if Xi Jinping does not withdraw his tax increase, the US will impose ‘additional tariffs on China of 50 per cent’ and terminate all scheduled talks with foreign power. Talk about pulling no punches, eh?
Last Wednesday, the White House said it would impose specific reciprocal tariffs on the ‘worst offenders’ around the world – targeting China with levies that would, in addition to earlier taxes, total 54 per cent. But the US leader’s latest threat could, if Trump follows through with it, see tariffs imposed on Jinping’s country top a whopping 100 per cent.
In a lengthy statement, The Donald raged on social media:
China issued retaliatory tariffs of 34 per cent, on top of their already record setting tariffs, non-monetary tariffs, illegal subsidisation of companies and massive long term currency manipulation, despite my warning that any country that retaliates against the US by issuing additional tariffs, above and beyond their already existing long term tariff abuse of our nation, will be immediately met with new and substantially higher tariffs, over and above those initially set.
Therefore, if China does not withdraw its 34 per cent increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, 8 April 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL tariffs on China of 50 per cent, effective 9 April. Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.
Shots fired! Will Xi Jinping back down – or return with his own counter-threat? Watch this space…
What Bibi and Trump get from each other
For all of their political similarities – imperiousness, indifference, more than occasional impunity – Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s canniest shared superpower is their ability to manipulate their public narratives. Case in point: Netanyahu’s sudden visit to Washington this week, which comes as both he and Trump battle the near-term uproar over their long-term political agendas.
The official reason for Netanyahu’s visit, it seems, is to discuss Trump’s new tariff edict – slated to place a 17 per cent levy on Israeli goods when it goes into effect next week. Despite the sizeable figure – which is certainly worth a challenge – the visit feels contrived. Far more economically important nations will be hit far harder by Trump’s tariff bombshell, yet he chose Israel as the first country to talk specifics.
Israel has already demonstrated flexibility on the tariffs front, scrapping its own levies against American products in the run-up to Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’. The move, while appearing strategic and offensive, has ultimately been revealed as a dud. Israel exported $22 billion to the US last year – three times the amount it imported in reverse. Even if Netanyahu can negotiate a tariff reduction, any ‘best-case’ scenario would still see a levy of 10 per cent by Israel’s largest trading partner. That means billions in added costs that need to be absorbed by someone.
Which suggests the real reason for Bibi’s visit is old-fashioned political cover and expediency. As they dominate their domestic news cycles, Trump and Netanyahu don’t need to score wins – what they need is distraction. Indeed, Trump didn’t invite Netanyahu to the White House as much as he summoned him there. While Bibi paraded across Budapest last week, Trump rang up Netanyahu and his hardline host, Viktor Orban, to unilaterally insert himself into the state visit.
Tariffs were the call’s ostensible purpose, but the only tangible takeaway was that Netanyahu was headed to Washington. The Monday confirmation date arrived shortly thereafter. The only real roadblock is the testimony Bibi is slated to give this week in his corruption trial back in Israel, which a judge would have to reschedule. Even considering Netanyahu’s formidable hostility to Israel’s legal system, such a dispensation would almost certainly be forthcoming.
And so Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in Washington this week, but mostly because he and Trump view the visit as their easiest and most obvious next move. With Bibi at his side in the Oval, Trump can get back to the more crowd-pleasing business of rescuing hostages and tussling with the Ayatollahs. Bibi’s presence also reignites MAGA hawks and Zionists – while providing fresh reason for pro-Palestinian progressives to noisily preen and protest. All while the Republicans lost their first major campaign since Trump’s November election last week – and global markets continue to wither by the trillions.
There are usually treats waiting there for Netanyahu upon arrival. Last time around Trump announced his outlandish Gaza transfer plan, the first by any foreign leader after Trump’s inauguration. With actual Gazans now actually emigrating from Gaza, Trump has demonstrated, yet again, that he can deliver for Israel, which only further edifies his Netanyahu entanglements.
With their disdain for establishment media and battles with their respective judiciaries, Trump and Netanyahu make for obvious (co)-dependents. Both are showmen and survivors with high tolerances for chaos and conflict.
Bibi, of course, must usually defer to his American patron, but Trump clearly respects his elder statesman status. As he teases exploring a possibly illegal third term, the President is already succumbing to the inevitable pull of sheer political longevity. And few leaders have survived for so long and so effectively like Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump is bending Japan to his will
‘National crisis’ was how Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba described the fallout from President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in a speech on Friday. That was strong language from the normally measured Ishiba, but was borne out by the bloodbath in the Nikkei stock exchange over the last few days of trading. Stock markets around the world have been battered, but Japan’s has been one of the worst. It plunged 2,600 points to close down a whopping 8 per cent today, the third largest fall on record.
Amongst the worst casualties were the Mizuho Financial Group, whose shares fell 10.6 per cent, and Mitsubishi, whose stock plunged by 10.2 per cent. Trading on futures was briefly suspended as circuit breaker limits were reached amid the carnage. Traders aren’t quite hurling themselves from office windows yet, but it has been a rough few days for the Japanese money men.
There is talk of a global slowdown tipping Japan into recession
The reason for all this mayhem? Cars. Japan employs nearly 6 million people – 8.3 per cent of the total workforce – in the auto industry, which accounts for 3 per cent of GDP. America is a critical market for this crucial national industry (Japan shipped 1.3 million cars to the US in 2024). With 25 per cent tariffs due to be imposed on Wednesday, and a similar duty to be levied on parts, there is an air of panic in the auto makers’ boardrooms and amongst policy makers.
No one knows quite what to expect, but a Nomura research institute analysis of the potential impact of Trump’s tariffs concluded that the changes could lead to a 0.7 per cent reduction in Japanese GDP over a year. There is talk of a global slowdown tipping Japan into recession. Shinichiro Kobayashi, chief economist of Mitsubishi UFJ Research, called the potential tariff war and trade frictions ‘the worst-case scenario’.
Adding to the financial shock is an emotional trauma which is developing, a feeling of ‘I thought we were friends’ betrayal. It seems that many in Japan believed there existed a kind of ‘special relationship’ with America that would have afforded some measure of relief from Trump’s global onslaught. Ishiba went on a charm offensive visit to Washington in February, bearing gifts and promising to vastly increase Japanese investment in the US, but to no avail.
Even the day after the tariffs were announced, some obviously still harboured hope of a reprieve. Chief cabinet secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi asked Washington for an exemption from the duties and pointedly reminded the US that Japanese automakers had invested over $60 billion (£47 billion) over the last four decades and created over 2.3 million jobs stateside. Again, this evidently had no effect.
The Japanese failed to read the room. On 2 April, Trump complained about the treatment of the US by ‘friend and foe’, adding that ‘in many cases friend is worse than foe’ – which may have been a veiled reference to Japan. In any case, Trump has had longstanding beef about Japan’s trade policies with the US, which long predates his political career. A bit of research would have unearthed this and indicated that little mercy could be expected.
Ishiba says he hopes to speak to Trump this week and is believed to be putting together a wide-ranging package of measures involving liquefied natural gas, cars, agriculture and national security on which to form the basis for negotiations. One problem for Ishiba, though, is that his own position is weak and he may not survive beyond Japan’s Upper House elections in July. Jeff Richards of Japan Today believes team Trump is well aware of this and may not be overkeen to deal with a leader potentially soon to depart. He also thinks there is no rapport whatsoever between the two men.
Therefore, unless President Trump is persuaded or forced to relent by internal dissent or a coordinated global backlash, it is likely that he will more or less get what he wants from Japan. Japanese automakers will just need to adapt to survive and, as so often in Japanese history – to borrow David Pilling’s phrase – bend adversity to their advantage.
They probably have the tools to do so. Japanese automakers operate 24 plants in the US and ramping up production in the States seems inevitable now (Mazda has already indicated they will do this). It won’t be easy, though. It is not as simple as just making more cars in the US. With parts, which sometimes make circuitous journeys around the world before reaching their final destination, also subject to tariffs, the global auto parts supply chain will need to be completely reorganised. This is a huge undertaking. There are already reports of US-branded parts being stockpiled.
The Nikkei is expected to remain volatile this week but, with Japan seemingly not prepared – or able – to hit back at the US, ought to stabilise. What might take longer to recover is the US-Japan relationship, which has been badly bruised. Japan is realising that ‘America First’ means exactly what it says – and that decades of careful alliance-building diplomacy count for precious little in Trump’s brave new business world.
Is Israel wrong to see Labour MPs as hostile actors?
Israel’s denial of entry to two Labour MPs is a truly shaming moment. Not for Israel, which, like all sovereign states, is perfectly at liberty to permit or deny entry to anyone it chooses. No, for Labour. That our ally, the Jewish nation, is so wary of Britain’s ruling party that it felt compelled to banish two of its representatives should generate some serious soul-searching in Labour.
The flap over Israel’s ejection of the MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang has been mad. It’s the hissy fit heard around the world. Leafy London is up in arms. ‘I am outraged’, thundered Emily Thornberry on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. Israel will ‘rue the day that they did this to British parliamentarians’, she said. What’s she going to do – write a mean tweet?
The performative tantrums of Britain’s bourgeois left are far more unbecoming than what Israel has done. Israel just decided that a couple of visitors from overseas were not conducive to the public good – something we in Blighty do all the time. Yet the way the fuming commentariat is talking about it you’d be forgiven for thinking Israel is a modern-day Stasi that had banged up a pair of valiant freedom fighters.
There are wordy fits of pique over Israel’s ‘shameful detention and deportation of British MPs’. Can everyone please calm down? Ms Mohamed and Ms Yang were offered hotel accommodation. Israel paid for their return flight to Britain. This was not Midnight Express. You don’t have to write a letter to Amnesty International. They’re fine.
Israel said it denied the MPs entry because it feared they would ‘spread hate speech’. They have certainly made insulting comments about Israel. Ms Mohamed accused Israel of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza. She has agitated for a ban on goods from Israeli settlements. Ms Yang called for sanctions against certain ministers in Israel’s government. If Israel views these MPs as hostile actors, is it wrong?
Some say a truly democratic nation would never forbid entry to its critics. I agree. But is it too much to ask that we take into account that Israel is currently at war with an army of anti-Semites that desires nothing short of its obliteration? I know it’s been a long time since Britain faced such an existential threat, but surely we have enough historical memory to empathise with Israel’s predicament. Wartime Israel is under no obligation to welcome politicians who have petitioned the world to condemn its war for survival as a crime against humanity.
The fury with Israel is such an orgy of cant. Sovereign states, including ours, deny entry to suspected undesirables all the time. Our list of reasons that a foreigner might be considered ‘non-conducive to the public good’ is exhaustive. Everything from previous ‘unacceptable behaviour’ to potentially causing disruption to ‘the conduct of [our] foreign policy’ is enough for a non-Brit to be turned away at the border. Why is it okay for us to keep out troublemakers, but not for Israel?
That Israel feels it must be cautious towards politicians from Britain is mortifying
In 2008, a Likud politician, Moshe Feiglin, was barred from Britain. The then Labour home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said his presence would ‘not be conducive to the public good’. Imagine the industrial-strength gall it must require for the party that barred entry to an Israeli politician to now reach for the smelling salts because Israel barred entry to two British politicians.
What’s more, David Lammy has said he would comply with the ICC’s ridiculous arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. So if the democratically elected Prime Minister of Israel were to set foot in our country, he’d be nabbed by the cops, and yet we demand that our politicians be free to waltz in and out Israel to their heart’s content? These are previously unscaled levels of hypocrisy.
All this chattering-class rage is not a principled objection to restrictions on the free movement of MPs. It’s more like the bruised ego of a former imperial power that can’t believe an uppity little state like Israel thinks it has the right to do what we sometimes do.
That Israel feels it must be cautious towards politicians from Britain is mortifying. It speaks to our failure to give the Jewish state the solidarity it deserved following Hamas’s fascistic invasion of 7 October.