The art of the undeal

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The flourish of Sir Starmer producing an invitation letter from the King of England from his pocket to hand to Trump was probably intended to add a little bit of drama to the event, but Sir Starmer hasn’t really got what it takes to be dramatic. He’d probably fail an audition for a bit part with his local Am Dram group, even if they were desperate for players. In any event, the idea that the letter and its content hadn’t been agreed through diplomatic channels in advance is for the birds – a public refusal by Trump of an unexpected invitation would hardly be helpful as an opening to the discussions. Still, however hammy it appeared, it ticked an important box when dealing with the narcissism of His Orangeness: it made him feel important, respected, and uniquely better than all his predecessors, none of whom was ever invited twice. (Whether Buck House and Number 10 have fully thought that through is another question; future presidents only invited once are now likely to feel slighted, especially if they compare themselves and their contribution to world affairs to the present incumbent. What one might call ‘State Visit Inflation’ risks devaluing the currency.)

The visit ticked a second box as well. Since Trump sees everything in transactional terms (usually presented as ‘what’s in it for the USA?’, but actually more about ‘what’s in it for me?’), giving him something he wants might make him better disposed to giving something in return. Or at least, that is presumably Sir Starmer’s fervent hope.

I wonder, though, whether it doesn’t rather ignore a third key characteristic of the current occupant of the White House. It doesn’t take a very detailed look at his business record to realise that this is a man who has never signed any deal which he didn’t believe that he could break at any time that it suited him. There is a long list of law suits involving stiffed suppliers and dissatisfied customers to testify to that. And it isn’t just his business dealings. This week, he effectively repudiated the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico by saying that he will override its provisions and impose tariffs anyway. His justification was that the agreement was signed by a previous administration whose leader was a fool. In an uncharacteristically honest way, he was right on both counts, although he ignored the fact that the previous administration in this case was the first Trump administration. But the real fools were the leaders of Mexico and Canada who either assumed that he would abide by an agreement that he signed, in the face of all the available evidence to the contrary, or else believed that he was just a short-term phenomenon about which they didn’t really need to worry unduly. Sir Starmer should be a great deal more wary than he seems to be about adding his name to that list of fools.

We don’t know, as yet, exactly what is in the ‘agreement’ with Zelensky over Ukrainian mineral rights, and maybe Zelensky has little choice but to sign something at this stage, but the chances of Trump honouring his side of any bargain should be assumed to be low, to put it mildly. In his attempt to dissuade Trump from getting too close to Putin, Zelensky is shouting very loudly that Putin is not a man whose word can be trusted. He's right, of course, but I wonder if he understands that Putin’s willingness to renege on any agreement probably only adds to Trump’s admiration of Putin, rather than sowing doubts. When Trump calls Putin ‘smart’, it’s a rather condescending statement carrying the unstated implication, ‘…but not as smart as me’. One of the most dangerous aspects of Trump’s unshakeable belief in his own deal-making ability is that he thinks that he can outsmart Putin. From Trump’s perspective, compared to Putin, Sir Starmer looks like a mere gnat.

There is one potential growth industry

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In order to maintain the fiction that government must always abide by the arbitrary fiscal rules that it itself writes, any additional expenditure in one area must be balanced either by cutting expenditure in another area, or else by increasing revenue. Or so says Sir Starmer. It’s dangerous nonsense, not least because it legitimises the arguments of all those arguing that ‘we should look after our own first’ by validating the idea that spending on refugees and asylum-seekers always and necessarily reduces the money available for homeless people (to choose one example), and especially homeless armed service veterans, a group considered by right-wingers as being particularly deserving. It would still be nonsense, even if it didn’t completely ignore the fact that the reasons for there being so many homeless people in that category are far more complex than a simple lack of cash or housing.

So when it comes to a demand from the military for more soldiers and more equipment, the first things in the government’s sights are, as ever, the old favourites: overseas aid, immigrants, welfare and the pensions triple lock. It is, apparently, entirely ‘obvious’ that those best-placed to bear the burden of paying for additional weaponry and military manpower are the poorest and weakest in society, both at home and abroad. Starmer’s announcement yesterday to divert money from the aid budget and increase the proportion of GDP devoted to preparing for war is hardly a surprise in that context.

The idea that defence preparedness should be measured by the proportion of GDP spent on armaments is, and always has been, a spectacularly stupid one, because there can never be any guarantee that spending more leads to a more effective fighting force. It could be achieved, for instance, by simply doubling the salary of every member of the armed forces. In itself, that might not be a bad thing to do anyway; the pay of junior ranks is not exactly over-generous, so maintaining the numbers involves targeting recruitment at young people living in the most deprived areas. (Recruitment isn’t currently terribly effective either, and whilst outsourcing recruitment might have generated private profit, it hasn’t done much for the numbers.) But increasing salaries wouldn’t make the forces any more useful for war-fighting. Alternatively, they could simply pay more for the equipment that they buy. That might sound like a silly idea, but given the MoD’s history in procurement, it’s one of the likeliest outcomes of an increase in budget. And while paying more for the same equipment (let alone buying equipment which either doesn’t work or is not needed) might help meet the arbitrary target of a percentage of GDP, it doesn’t improve the capability of the UK’s armed forces.

What Sir Starmer did yesterday is what he has been saying for months that he would not do, which is to pre-empt the conclusion of the Strategic Defence Review. Worse still, the reason he’s done it is more about appeasing the madman in the White House than about defending the UK. The working assumption of the military mind – and, it would appear, the Sir Starmer mind – is that the supposed enemy is just waiting for us to drop our guard before launching an all-out invasion to seize land and oppress the population. How likely is that in practice? Assuming for a moment that the enemy really wants to control the UK, invasion is about the least cost-effective way of doing it. Far better and a great deal cheaper in terms of lives as well as money to take over the country from within and install a puppet government, as committed to rule by oligarch as Putin himself is. It increasingly looks like a strategy which has worked beyond his wildest dreams in the US, and brings a bonus in that the puppet government can help him to repeat the trick elsewhere.

On the receiving end of Sir Starmer’s pusillanimity are some of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, already hit by the body blow of the Trumpian destruction of USAID.  Still, it is, as they say, ‘an ill wind…’, and for a government obsessed with growth there is one group of ‘entrepreneurs’ likely to see an increase in demand for their services – people smugglers. One of the likeliest consequences of aid cuts will be an increase in the number of people seeking to migrate from where they currently live to the richest countries of the world – including the UK – in search of a better life. Whether Sir Starmer’s attack on living standards of the poorest in the UK acts as a sufficient counter-deterrent remains to be seen.

There has to be a better way of ensuring peace

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To all intents and purposes, NATO is dead, even if that wasn’t quite what the new German Chancellor said yesterday. It is entirely clear that members can no longer assume that the US will abide by the commitment that ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Without the support of the largest and most powerful member, the claimed deterrent effect of NATO is effectively nullified. To be fair to Trump, all he has done is to clarify what some of us have suspected for many years under a succession of US presidents, which is that the US will never commit to all-out war to save a far-away European country from being wholly or partially eaten up by a larger neighbour. The theoretical point of ‘deterrence’, however, was about creating a sufficient degree of uncertainty. Although the supposed adversary, Russia, might have doubted US commitment, they could never be entirely certain. Trump has removed that uncertainty.

Putin took a calculated gamble in Ukraine, mitigated by signalling his intentions well in advance and assessing the reactions, that the country’s friends would not intervene actively on behalf of a country which wasn’t even a member of NATO. His judgement was proved correct on that (even if it was proved dramatically wrong in terms of Ukraine’s ability and willingness to resist, and the extent to which the population was waiting to give a warm greeting to the Russian ‘liberators’). The military types keep telling us that, having got away with taking a big chunk out of Ukraine, he will turn his attention elsewhere – the Baltics are the most-often named target. It would still be a gamble for Putin. Whilst he can now be completely certain that the US would not rush to aid those attacked (indeed, the current president might be more inclined to sit down with Putin and decide how to split the spoils), he cannot be so certain about the European response. Indeed, he would be very unwise to gamble that several other European nations would not respond to any call for help from, say, Lithuania if he tried to create a corridor to Kaliningrad, one of the more commonly posited reasons for starting a war. Scandinavian countries along with Poland would be very likely to engage (albeit not under the umbrella of NATO (if it still exists), even if the response of the larger European military powers, such as France, the UK, and Germany might be less certain. Having already learned, to his cost – or, rather, to the cost of the dead and wounded soldiers and their families – that the Russian army isn’t quite the force he believed it to be, why would he risk such an attack?

That brings us to the crux of the question of future European security. For those of us who’ve never been convinced that security comes through ever-increasing amounts of weaponry, the issue has to be about ensuring that an attack is prevented not by military means but by ensuring that there is no reason to attack in the first place. That doesn’t mean following a policy of appeasement, as the warmongers claim. Of course, if Putin really is the madman as which he is often presented, sitting in the Kremlin stroking his cat like some sort of Bond villain plotting world domination, then there is little scope for rational debate and negotiated common security. (On the other hand, if that is indeed an accurate picture of Putin, then the history of the film franchise would suggest that we don’t need a large army to defeat him, just one man armed with a pistol and a few Martinis.)

If we discount the possibility of simple insanity, the single most frequent cause of conflict, historically, is access to wealth and resources, even if it isn’t always presented that way. The second is a fear of attack unless ‘our side’ attacks first: the ‘use it or lose it’ mindset. Both of those look more likely as causes of the war in Ukraine, for example, than an insane desire for domination at all costs, with the idea that Russia and Ukraine are a single historical identity and nation being more a stated rationalization than an actual reason. Even if the fear of attack is irrational or unjustified, it still acts as a motivation: fear doesn’t have to be reasonable to motivate a response. I don’t believe that NATO ever had any intention of attacking Russia, but it isn’t parroting Putin to suggest that things might not have looked that way from Moscow.

Most Europeans and most Russians probably want the same things: peace and prosperity. Both are being let down by leaders who tell them that those things can only be achieved by war and impoverishment rather than discussion and agreement. There’s never a ‘right’ time to break the cycle – there will always be unresolved disputes and arguments. But the ‘best’ time will always be ‘now’, whenever now is. Where are the politicians able to recognise that?

The problem of capricious autocracy

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One of the more surprising, at first sight anyway, revelations of the war in Ukraine has been that the Russian armed forces – whose strength and capability we have been told to fear for decades – have been shown to be rather less effective in practice than the military hype suggested. They appear to be slowly turning the war in their direction anyway, but that owes more to their ability to field – and willingness to lose – larger numbers of soldiers than their Ukrainian opponents.

The reasons for their poor performance are varied, but the main ones appear to mirror the wider problems of the Russian state apparatus, many of them inherited from the Soviet Union which preceded it. It is riddled with corruption and bribery, and successive purges have ensured that those at the top comply with the wishes of the Kremlin, and fear taking any decision with which the man at the top might disagree. Those lower down in the hierarchy know that they must wait for their orders and not show any undue initiative, initiative being seen as a threat to the established order. It makes for slow, cautious decision-taking and a sclerotic organisation.

It looks increasingly as though Trump, instead of seeing this as a warning, is seeing it as a model to be emulated. He is conducting a ruthless purge of any public servants who might not be fully attuned to his thinking, and since his thinking changes by the day, or even by the hour, he is creating a situation where decision-taking becomes increasingly difficult, as people wait to be told what to do. He is now extending that approach to the armed forces, purging top generals and replacing them with people who are loyal only to him, and not to the Constitution as their oath of allegiance requires. The working assumption of his administration seems to be that anyone who isn’t a white male has obviously only been appointed because of their gender or skin colour, and should therefore be removed. Those who replace them will be Trump loyalists, waiting to be told what to do. An autocracy headed by someone who changes his mind suddenly and randomly can end up being even less effective than an autocracy headed by someone ruthless and single-minded, but full of corruption and bribery.

Maybe it’s all part of a really cunning plan to make war between the US and Russia less likely by reducing the effectiveness of the US military to the same level as that of Russia. Other explanations are available.

Pity the drafters of that communiqué

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Last week, Trump appeared to crown himself King of the USA. Perhaps it was a joke, although I’m not really sure that he does jokes, seemingly being prone to a degree of confusion between a joke and an insult. It has occurred to me previously that he might rather fancy the idea of a hereditary presidency, and that’s all a king is, really; so it’s more likely that he’s simply planting the idea so that it doesn’t come as a surprise later. We know that he strongly believes that ability is down to genes, and that he has what he calls ‘good genes’, which he apparently inherited from his uncle. Inheriting genes from his uncle might, of course, tell us something not previously known about the intimate relationships of his family members, but it’s more likely that we lesser mortals simply don’t have the capacity to understand the science of inheritance the way that Trump does. His genes clearly give him a level of understanding beyond the ken of other mortals, to say nothing of an entitlement to rule.

In any event, his belief in his own ability is unshakeable, as is the belief that anything he says becomes truth simply by issuing from his mouth. And once he’s said something and it has appeared in the media, he can legitimately say that he’s read reports about whatever it is, thereby reinforcing its truthiness, and attribute it to the media, who are only (and always) ‘fake’ if they dare to correct him. It is into that parallel universe which Sir Starmer is planning to venture next week, assuming that the meeting goes ahead and doesn’t get cancelled because Trump takes offence in advance at what Sir Starmer has said he’s going to raise, or at his refusal to pardon and release a random selection of people about whom Trump has heard reports in the meantime, abolish VAT, and cut taxes on US billionaires.

There have, historically, been other meetings where the two parties have gone in with rather different expectations as to the nature of the discussion, but not many with the sort of gulf which is opening out at present. Sir Starmer rather simplistically thinks he is going there to explain the European perspective to Trump and plead with him to maintain existing long standing alliances. It’s based on the naïve belief that the so-called ‘special relationship’ ever meant anything to the US, rather than simply being part of a UK attempt to big itself up; Trump is simply being more honest about the true US view on that issue. Trump, on the other hand, probably thinks that Sir Starmer is going to the US to receive his orders with the expectation that he will faithfully execute them on his return.

The people I feel sorry for are the staffers on both sides, tasked with writing some sort of joint communiqué which presents a complete non-meeting of two minds (well, one and a half) as though it were a hugely consequential agreement on matters of great importance. Which Trump will probably refute within days.

Holding up a whole civilisation

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Perhaps it’s inevitable that a person elected to the leadership of a major political party starts to believe that the whole world is hanging on his or her every word. It’s a heady position in which to find oneself, with access to media coverage all but guaranteed. An exaggerated sense of self-importance comes with the territory. But there’s the ordinary, everyday exaggerated sense of self-importance – and then there’s Kemi Badenoch. In her case, it’s not just an inflated sense of the importance of what she has to say; she genuinely seems to believe that the whole future of Western civilisation is now hanging on her ability to renew the English Conservative and Unionist Party. ‘Renew’ is another of those ‘interesting’ words which means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, but is intended to convey some sort of revival. In her case, it seems to include the elimination of dissident thought, another of those British values which seems to have passed me by.

Uniquely, it seems, in her deluded understanding of world events, the values that make the West what it is – or at least, her interpretation of those values, which just possibly, maybe, might not be the same thing, although it would be a brave person that might try and tell her that – are now uniquely to be found amongst those in that party who think like her. And she seems not even to realise the extent to which she is carving out a minority status for herself, even amongst the dwindling ranks of her party’s membership.

The thing is, it’s actually difficult to discern from what she says what her understanding of those values is. Certainly it seems to include the right to hold and express racist or misogynistic views, to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t conform to ‘the norm’, and to believe that some entire cultures are inherently inferior to the one to which she thinks that she belongs (although, whisper it quietly, at least some of those to whom she is seeking to appeal might just harbour some doubts as to whether she can ever fit into their own definition of the superior culture). The problem with banging on about British or Western values is that they are pretty poorly defined. What the term actually means seems to depend on the perspective of the person banging on about them at the time. But to the extent that there are some underlying shared values, I had thought that they included things like the rule of law, fairness, equality, compassion and tolerance, none of which actually seem to shine through her words on the issue. Perhaps the values changed at some point and I just didn’t get the memo.

Who needs the translator?

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Last week, Trump had a lengthy and somewhat controversial conversation with Putin. According to this report, the reason that the call lasted so long was that Putin doesn’t speak English, so that translators were required. It’s a very ethno-centric way of looking at it. It could equally be said that the translators were required because Trump doesn’t speak Russian, an alternative perspective which seems to have completely gone over the heads of the Americans.

Besides, it isn’t even true. Putin speaks English fairly well, even if he prefers not to do so when involved in negotiations and discussions, to the extent of having been observed correcting the translators on previous occasions. He’s also very fluent in German, giving him at least three languages, compared to Trump’s one. And listening to Trump speak on occasions, there are surely grounds for wondering whether he can legitimately claim to speak even one language fluently. Even if Putin were content to use English in the discussion, translators might still be needed to make sense of some of Trump’s words (covfefe, anyone?) let alone his mangled and rambling sentences.

It reveals a lot about American attitudes that the man who speaks three languages reasonably well is regarded as the problem requiring a translator, whilst the man who struggles to make sense in one is regarded as the norm.

Time to replace NATO?

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The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for the approach which it is adopting to ending the war in Ukraine. But there are two things which Trump says which are surely uncontroversial in themselves. The first is that the war needs to end, on which most will surely agree. The second is that some boundary adjustments will need to be a part of that, which is much more contentious, but nevertheless a statement of an obvious truth.

Those boundary adjustments, whether permanent or temporary, will inevitably involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia because, realistically, the only way of returning to 2014 borders is for other countries to commit large numbers of troops and resources to the war alongside Ukraine. A third Europe-wide war doesn’t necessarily have to involve nuclear oblivion, but that’s an obvious risk. And there's surely some doubt about whether the youth of Europe in the twenty-first century are willing to be conscripted and sent to Ukraine to die. Asking, let alone instructing, Ukraine to concede territory is neither fair nor just, and Trump’s rationale – which appears to be that Putin has lost a lot of soldiers to gain the territory so deserves to keep what he’s paid for in blood – is an appalling basis for making a concession to aggression. It’s also very one-sided, ignoring the cost that Ukraine has paid to resist the aggression as though Ukrainian lives don’t matter. It is, though, hardly surprising coming from a man who sees everything in terms of transactions, who believes that the strong should dominate the weak, and who has already made it very clear that he rather likes the idea of emulating Putin’s land grab himself.

Even so, for a man whose self-image is that of a master dealmaker to concede much of what the other party wants in advance of any detailed talks is incongruous, to say the least. He surely realises that any process of negotiation will only involve further concessions, and that far from being a mutual process he has to date extracted precisely nothing from Putin in return. He’s also agreed that Ukraine will not be joining NATO for the foreseeable future. At least that one is within his authority. Since new members can only be accepted by unanimous decision, he can block membership although, again, conceding that publicly in advance of any serious talks doesn’t look like a masterstroke of bargaining. Nor does it suggest that he has thought further ahead than the next news cycle.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of NATO anyway; the idea that dividing the world into hostile military blocks armed to the teeth is a rational long-term way of preventing war has always struck me as being a curious one. Trump has exposed the essential weakness of the alliance: if the most powerful member goes rogue, the alliance becomes meaningless. By declaring in advance that any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine will not be acting on behalf of NATO, and that no attack on them by Russia will trigger the clause decreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all, he has rendered the alliance in its current form largely pointless and toothless, giving Putin the green light to attack the peacekeepers whenever he wishes. However, in the long term, if we can navigate our way through the period of danger which he has created, he might even be doing us a favour, albeit unintentionally.

The question is about how to respond. Whilst it would have been better to have approached the question in calmer times and with more time to work things through, challenging the whole basis of the alliance is not in itself a bad thing. European nations – including Ukraine – need to think about how best to bring about a secure and peaceful Europe which can co-exist with Russia to the east as well as with the US to the west, rather than simply depending on the military power of the US for the first and subservience to the US for the second. It’s potentially an opportunity to negotiate a mutual downsizing of military forces and to remove actual or perceived threats on both sides by re-establishing a degree of trust and co-operation, alongside a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation within the framework of international law. It’s unclear whether Russia under Putin (or his successors – he won’t be around for ever, and we’re talking about long term solutions here) is ready to even begin such a process. Maybe it’s naïve to expect it to happen rapidly, but European states are hardly sending positive signals about their own willingness to engage in such a process either. The default position increasingly looks like some sort of attempt to build a replacement for NATO which excludes the US, and continue the armed stand-off, with Starmer's Labour in the vanguard, determined to look tough. That would be a huge missed opportunity to seek to find a long term positive in the short term chaos being unleashed by the madman in the White House.

Sometimes a small dose doesn't inoculate, it increases the desire

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When it comes to traditional vaccines, the science of giving people a small dose, a dose of a milder version, or a dead sample of the pathogen in order to promote the formation of antibodies and thus protect the individuals is well-established. And whatever some of the anti-vaxxers of this world might say, the evidence is that it overwhelmingly works, with complications and harm from the vaccine being extremely rare occurrences.

It's a category error, however, to seek to apply the same principle in the world of politics, and it’s a category error which the current Starmer government is making with great enthusiasm. Feeling threatened by the potential public support for Reform’s desire for mass deportations and ever more heartless treatment of the most desperate, they seem to believe that releasing selective footage of a tiny number of individuals being shackled and escorted onto planes for deportation will somehow defeat the toxin offered by Farage and his crew. But for those who want mass deportations, action against a tiny number doesn’t protect against the desire for more, it inflames it. ‘If they can do it for a few, why not for millions’ is a more likely reaction than ‘who needs Reform when Labour are doing the same thing’.

It shouldn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to work out that legitimising the process on a small scale will only encourage those who want to implement it on a large scale to ask themselves whether, if the approach is acceptable, they shouldn’t just vote for people who actually want to do much more of it rather than someone who believes that doing a little will be enough to buy their votes. Maybe there really will be some who will conclude that, if they can get Labour to implement Reform’s policies, then they don’t need to vote for Reform at all. But implementing Reform’s policies to stop Reform from gaining power to implement its policies doesn’t look like the smartest of moves. And whether that’s where Labour should be looking for votes is a matter on which people may have different opinions. To the extent that there are still some half-decent members and supporters of the Labour Party, it might lose them more than it gains them, but these are all calculations which Labour has presumably attempted to carry out in its attempts to stave off the surge towards Reform.

That, perhaps, is the greatest condemnation of all for Labour’s approach. Gaining and retaining power by implementing whatever policies seem most likely to achieve that has elevated that aim to be the be all and end all of their approach to politics. For a party founded on noble principles it’s reaching for the absolute nadir.

If not now, when?

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Last week, the new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, visited Panamá for talks. After his return, the White House told the media that Panamá had agreed to allow US warships to pass through the canal without payment, a statement which the President of Panamá immediately blasted as a lie. Rubio later walked back the claim, but clarified ominously that he had ‘made US expectations clear’. Apologists for Trump keep insisting that much of what he says and threatens is just a negotiating ploy from an experienced businessman and that this sort of thing is just an example of that, but the only business negotiations which start with a threat and ‘expectations’ are those involving the Mob. ‘Nice canal you’ve got there; be a shame if anything were to happen to it’ is not a normal approach to a business negotiation. It is increasingly clear that bullying other countries, preferably picking them off one at a time using the threat of military or economic force is the preferred modus operandi of Trump 2.0.

Starmer’s response to date is understandable, even if wrong-headed, and his instinctive indecisiveness doesn’t help. As the leader of a middle-ranking power whose electorate were persuaded to opt out of a strong trading bloc under the post-imperial delusion of being a global power, he’s in an almost impossible situation. He wants a deal with both, but his claim that the UK doesn’t need to choose between the US and the EU is nonsense. (To take just one example of where it breaks down, we cannot have a deal with the EU which facilitates free movement of agricultural produce meeting agreed standards without checks or controls alongside a deal with the US which allows agricultural produce which doesn’t meet those standards into the UK.) He probably knows that in the margins of his consciousness, but is unwilling to upset any of those who favour either approach over the other, so has decided, by default, to let things drift with an occasional act of genuflection to he-who-must-be-obeyed. Even if the so-called ‘special relationship’ ever existed, it does not currently go beyond protecting and promoting the interests of US billionaires.

It isn’t just on food products that the UK will have to give ground in pursuit of a trade deal with the US. Trump has decided that taxing the tech companies and the billionaires who own them is an act of discrimination against US companies, and has made an implicit threat of tariffs unless the UK backs down. The Brexit ‘freedom to set our own rules’ apparently contains a previously unstated caveat saying ‘unless the US decides otherwise’. Trump is also capricious. One of his latest rants concerns the replacement of paper straws with plastic ones. Paper ones, he claims, don’t work: they disintegrate during use. And you can get your drink on your tie. But his real objection seems to be that the move against single-use plastics was instigated by Biden; that is enough to make it axiomatically wrong and in need of reversal. What if he decides that any country which mandates paper straws is discriminating against US-owned companies and franchises, such as MacDonalds, or KFC? Does that become another reason for introducing tariffs?

In truth, his repeated statements suggest that he wants tariffs anyway as a basic part of his policy to reduce the income tax paid by billionaires, and that he will find an excuse to introduce them in the end. If he can extract a series of concessions by alternatively threatening and then delaying in the meantime, all the better – he still gets his tariffs and others have kneeled before him. That’s the thing about a bully like Trump. Every concession reinforces his own belief that he is strong and that others are weak; and if it comes too easily, he assumes that he simply didn’t demand enough. Thus, every demand met encourages new and bigger demands. And when he thinks that he’s extracted all he can get, he’ll do what he always intended to do anyway.

The first question for governments in the rest of the world – and this is particularly acute for any state which has deluded itself into thinking that it’s so special and unique that it can stand alone – is where and when to draw the line and call out this behaviour. Before or after the invasion of Panamá? Before or after the seizure of Greenland? Before or after the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza? Before or after Trump and Putin carve up Ukraine? Maybe, as some of those supportive of him claim, he won’t actually do any of those things, but assuming that he won’t do what he has repeatedly said that he wants to do only works until he does it – and then it’s too late. Lack of vocalised opposition in advance or any consequences after the event looks a lot like acquiescence. Because that’s what it is.

The bigger question is how to stop the president of the most powerful state the world has ever seen from doing whatever he wants. It’s not a question to which there is a simple answer. We should know, however, that there is one very obvious wrong answer, and that is that each country has to fight its own battles (or, more likely, make its own concessions), which is the choice Starmer seems to be making. Strength lies in, at the very least, coordination of actions and responses. Maybe there really isn’t any way of stopping what’s happening, and we have no choice but to roll over. It would be better, though, for that to be a conclusion reached by thought and analysis and accompanied by a credible mitigation strategy rather than through complacent assumptions along the lines of ‘he really wouldn’t, would he?’.

One other thing. Assuming that we don’t need to worry because he’s only got four years and we can sort it out when he’s gone is a huge mistake. Partly, that’s because some of his changes will be hard to reverse, or even completely irreversible, including changes to voting practices in ways that benefit him and his supporters or impeaching non-compliant judges. But even if he can’t find a way of winning a third term or cancelling elections, there can still be no guarantee that it ends in four years. Whilst the constitution rules out his being elected again, it doesn’t prevent him installing a puppet and pulling the strings from the sidelines. One of his progeny, perhaps – I suspect that the idea of a hereditary presidency might well appeal to him. The only limit on his direct potential influence is his age and mortality. And even after he’s gone, he has already changed the Republican Party so much that there are plenty of others willing to carry on. Deciding to ‘wait and see’ what he does is tantamount to licensing whatever he decides to do. Yet that’s where Starmer is choosing to place the UK.

The oldest tricks still work for some

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Boxer’s response to everything was always “I will work harder”. His belief that working harder would solve all problems was unshakeable. It’s a belief shared by many of the UK’s politicians as well as some ‘business leaders’, although they work to the slightly different version: “You must work harder”. The underlying problem of the UK economy, in their eyes, is simply that people aren’t working hard enough. Last week it was the Tories, with Chris Philp claiming that the UK was lacking a proper work ethic. This week, Labour are at it, with ministers threatening to make redundant any civil servants who don’t achieve more with fewer staff and less money.

We can probably take it as read that most of us believe that, in most situations, it’s better to use resources – whether financial or human – as efficiently as possible (although it’s worth noting that efficiency at a micro-economic level isn’t always the same thing as efficiency at a macro-economic level). But how is that efficiency to be measured and assessed? It’s not easy to measure the output of the average civil servant – or indeed, any employee who isn’t directly producing something which can be counted. But without measuring output, it’s impossible to measure productivity, which in this context is a cypher for efficiency. In that situation, lazy employers (in which category, we can generally count governments and public authorities as well as many private companies) fall back on simply cutting the resources available to do a job and insisting that the workers continue to do everything asked of them.

It isn’t really improving ‘efficiency’, although it often seems to ‘work’, at a simplistic level. The staff involved may suffer more stress, and may resort to working extra hours, but as long as those hours are ‘free’ – and in many situations that is what employers insist upon, although that’s a trend more common in the private sector than the public – then achieving the same output with less input counts as an increase in productivity, and it doesn’t even require measurement of the output to conclude that. Maybe corners have been cut, regulations ignored, staff well-being damaged, but none of that matters in economic terms. If 8 people each working 10 hours a day (whilst being paid for 8) can achieve as much as 10 people working 8 hours a day, economists will proclaim that productivity has improved. It hasn’t really, of course. The work done has still taken 80 person-hours, it’s just that the employer has only paid for 64 of those. People haven’t worked any harder – just longer.

‘Sweating the resources’, squeezing more out of people in order to improve profitability – it’s obvious who benefits from that, and it ain’t the employees. Yet somehow, the all-pervasive idea that the ‘problem’ is that workers aren’t working hard enough diverts attention from the underlying economic power relationship, and encourages people to blame themselves rather than their masters for poor economic performance, even if, in reality, that poor performance is often due to a lack of investment and innovation, issues which lie more in the hands of employers than employees.

Boxer accepted responsibility enthusiastically, and eventually collapsed from overwork. His reward for his service to his masters was to be sold to the knacker’s yard. What worked for Napoleon seems to be still working today.

Keeping 'them' at arms length is deliberate policy

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It turns out that Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU amounts to little more than changing the colour of the icing on the imaginary cake. Just like his predecessors, he believes that the UK is so important to everyone that it can have the advantages of membership of the EU without having to abide by the same rules, or make any concessions in return. Little Englander cakeism is alive and well in the English Labour Party; it’s just a little more polite and diplomatic in its language.

One of the issues surrounds the idea of some sort of youth mobility scheme, under which young people from the UK and young people from the EU would be given the right, for a limited period of time, to travel to each other’s countries and experience a little of life there. Getting to know and understand each other better is one of the aims of the whole European project, which began in the aftermath of a war in which a lack of common understanding led to millions of deaths. Youth mobility is one of those things which, taken in isolation, many would consider entirely unobjectionable. Not so the Home Secretary, who sees it as allowing ‘migration’ and is strongly opposing it in cabinet, even if the consequence is a lack of movement on the PM’s stated objective of smoothing trade between the EU and the UK. Given that it’s a mutual scheme – traffic is supposed to be two ways – what is the objection to such a reasonable proposal?

The Home Secretary clearly believes that there would be a large difference between the numbers coming here from the EU and the numbers travelling from the UK to the EU, which would show in the statistics as an increase in net migration. There are two reasons why she might be right.

The first is language. Whilst proficiency in two or more languages is common in most of Europe, with English being the second language of choice in most cases, modern foreign language teaching has largely been gutted in the UK. Other Europeans find it easier to adapt to the UK than young people from the UK do in the rest of Europe. That makes the UK a destination of choice for young Europeans (and, of course, part of the reason that the EU is pushing the idea so hard).

The second is to do with class and affluence. In the UK, the desire to allow young people to broaden their experiences and learn about other peoples and cultures is largely a middle-class obsession. Look at who supports it – the liberal and middle class elites. It just doesn’t have the same resonance and attraction for young working class people in the so-called ‘red wall’ or post-industrial areas. It’s not something that they see as relevant to them. The political opposition comes overwhelmingly from the Little Englanders who very much want those young people not to mingle with foreigners in case they do find a commonality of interest and understanding. And it’s that political opposition which is the real obstacle.

The fact that the Home Secretary might be right about the imbalance in numbers is not, however, a reason for simply dismissing the idea completely. The language problem could be overcome, in time, by investing more in the teaching of European languages, and the problem of relevance only to middle-class children could be overcome by a system of grants, scholarships, and encouragement for those not following a more academic path in life. But both of those things require political will and a consistent policy over many years; and that is the problem. If your political strategy depends on stoking hatred and fear of difference, to say nothing of an inherent belief in your own group’s natural superiority, the last thing you want is to encourage any mingling with ‘them’.

Sadly, such Little Englandism isn’t confined to the ranks of Reform and the Tories; it seems to have found a very comfortable home in the Labour Party as well. Worse, within the UK it isn’t even wholly confined to England either. In Wales, however, we do have a route to escape it if we choose. It wouldn’t take long for an independent Wales to understand that our longer term interests have more in common with those of a number of other small nations and regions on the mainland than with our large neighbour, stuck as it is in a distorted dream of past glory.

Taking one for the team?

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Assuming that Trump succeeds with his desire to annex Canada, would it really be merged into the US as a single new state, number 51? In simple geographic terms, Canada covers a greater area (9.99 square kilometres) than the whole of the US (9.15 square kilometres), and a single state covering a greater area than the other 50 looks unbalanced, to say the least. In population terms, it’s true that the total population of Canada (about 37 million) is less that the population of California (about 39.5 million). But it’s also true that eight of Canada’s ten provinces each have a population greater than the smallest US state, and one of them, Ontario, has a population which would make it the fifth largest US state. The other two, along with the three ‘territories’, have lower populations than even the smallest US state, but the constitution, as far as I’m aware, sets neither a minimum or a maximum.

The difference between joining as one state or as a number of new states is important, electorally. Canada as a single additional state would only add 2 members to the Senate, although even that might make a difference given the closeness of Senate elections in recent years. However, adding between 8 and 13 new states would add 16 to 26 new members; potentially making a huge difference to political outcomes in an enlarged US. We don’t know, of course, how Canadians would vote; politics in Canada is much more complex than the overtly two-party system in the US. However, given the generally more liberal attitudes amongst Canadians, it’s not wholly unreasonable to speculate that they might break decisively in favour of the Democrats rather than the Republicans. It would probably be enough to keep the Republicans out of power for the foreseeable future. I guess that might explain why everything Trump says refers to Canada as a single additional state: even if two extra Democrats made Senate control harder to achieve for the Republicans, it doesn’t look as impossible as adding as many as 26.

If Canadians were given a choice about merging with the US (and we cannot, of course, simply assume that Trump would allow that), it’s hard to see them – and this is especially true of Quebeckers – agreeing to do so as one state rather than as several. For Trump, it looks like a double-edged sword – expand the territory at the cost of a loss of political control. It’s almost tempting to suggest that the rest of the world should ask Canadians to take one for the team in order to prevent any recurrence of the current madness. The only problem is that I’m not entirely convinced that the same thing couldn’t happen under the Democrats. The differences between the two are smaller than many think. Trump, after all, could have decided to stand as a Democrat rather than a Republican: in a political system largely devoid of ideological differences and based almost entirely around individuals, party labels aren’t particularly meaningful. Assuming that the problem is only one for Republicans is a big mistake.

How are the benefits of trade to be shared?

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After a few days of chaos, it’s still unclear exactly what Trump wants from Canada in exchange for not imposing tariffs in a month’s time. He claims it’s about three things: drugs, migrants, and trade imbalances but, as is ever the case, any numbers he quotes are at variance with any objective analysis. There have been some suggestions that, on both drugs and migrants, the flow from the US to Canada is greater than the flow from Canada to the US. The nature of illegal flows is that we can never be certain of their true extent, but such a conclusion meets the ‘common sense’ test; it certainly sounds credible.

That leaves us with a trade imbalance. There certainly is one, even if not as large as Trump claims, but the logic (insofar as that word can be used) of Trump’s position, with his threat to impose tariffs on any country or bloc which has a trade surplus with the US, is that all bilateral trade should be at or near a point of balance between imports and exports - or else favourable to the US. It’s an impossible target, and even if it were desirable, unilateral tariffs followed by retaliatory tariffs will not achieve it. They will merely increase prices for consumers in all the countries involved.

Maybe his real agenda is the one he’s now stated often enough – the annexation of Canada, and its incorporation into the US. That would certainly make the trade imbalance disappear – or rather give a good impression of disappearing. It wouldn’t really disappear at all, of course – it would merely be internalised. The ‘51^st state’ would still be selling more to the other 50 states than it was buying from them, but no-one would notice any more. It’s equally true today that, within the current 50 states, some ‘export’ more to other states than they ‘import’ from them, but no-one cares very much because it’s all internal to the US.

Well, I say that no-one cares very much, but that’s not exactly true; it’s more that those who do care don’t realise what it is that they care about. To the extent that importing more than they export impacts the prosperity of the state concerned, that imbalance makes some US states poorer than others. Job opportunities are elsewhere, and young people often migrate out in pursuit of them. More economic migrants. In this respect, the economic relationship between some states and their fellow states within the US is not entirely unlike that between Wales and England (or more precisely, Wales and the south-east of England). But as long as all the international trade statistics treat the US (or the UK) as a single entity, those economic disparities disappear into the overall average. Annexing Canada would, in itself, make no difference whatsoever to the economic relationship between Canada and the 50 states – or to the people within those 50 states. It would merely make the discrepancy dissolve into the US average.

Taking the world as a whole, trade is always in balance. Total exports match total imports. It cannot mathematically be otherwise, because at a global level, it’s a closed system. Drawing arbitrary lines on a map and trying to balance trade across them is then a pointless exercise. The issue is, or should be, about how the economic benefits within that global closed system are distributed. It’s a question that the Trumps of this world can’t even understand, let alone answer.

Does Trump have a cunning plan to reduce the number of people flying?

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Trump’s comments in the wake of the air disaster last week were appalling by any civilised standard. Declaring, without evidence, that it was the result of diversity policies, along with his suggestion that the job of Air Traffic Controller can only be done by geniuses and that those geniuses are exclusively to be found in one particular demographic, managed to showcase his racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia and homophobia almost in fewer words than it takes to list them. Like other opponents of diversity programmes, he seeks to deliberately mislead people about the nature of such programs, suggesting that they imply employing people who can’t do the job but match an under-represented demographic, rather than seeking to ensure that, in identifying and appointing people who can do the job, there is no direct or indirect discrimination against certain demographics and that employers attempt to reflect the diverse nature of the society in which they operate within their workforce.

His comment that people need to be geniuses to become Air Traffic Controllers rather begs the question about who decides what a genius is, and on what basis. We already know, of course, that Trump is himself a genius and a very stable one at that. We know that because he has told us so. Is his definition good enough? To put the question another way, if you were about to take a flight into US airspace, and you knew that the Air Traffic Controller handling the landing at your destination airport was only in post because he was an able-bodied white heterosexual male in possession of an official certificate stating that he is a Trump-level genius, would you still want to board the plane? It might help to reduce aviation-derived emissions in the US, I suppose.