Government
spokespersons have been quick to try and spin the fact that the UK has been hit by Trump with a lower tariff than others as a product of Sir Starmer’s genius approach
of doing whatever it takes to please Trump – saying ‘yes sir’ in all the right
places, offering the shiny bauble of a visit to the King of England, hinting at
reducing taxes on US tech companies etc. It’s a form of self-reassurance for a
government which doesn’t really know what to do.
I’m not sure that it’s
true, though. Trump didn’t get to a policy of charging exorbitant tariffs on non-existent
imports from uninhabited islands by considering how nice the penguins were
being to him, even if some of them are indeed king penguins. The approach he
took was the entirely arbitrary one of counting the number of apples in Tesco,
dividing it by the number of oranges in Aldi and halving the difference, or
some other equally irrational mathematical approach. The UK has been subjected
to exactly the same calculation, based on exactly the same algorithm, as all
the other countries; there’s no special treatment involved at all. The tariff
on UK goods is low because the UK does not have a trading surplus with the US,
which implies a lesser punishment has been meted out because the UK is not
particularly good at selling goods to the US.
It might
legitimately be counted as a Brexit dividend, though. Had the UK still been
part of the EU, the punishment would have been based on the balance of trade
between the US and the EU, and because the rest of the EU appears to be rather
good at selling more to the US than it buys from them, the UK would have been
hit with the same tariffs. I’m not entirely convinced, though, that enabling the
UK to be judged on the basis of its own failures rather than on the success of
the EU as a whole is a ‘dividend’ about which we should be boasting.
The worst aspect
about assuming that a lower tariff is
some sort of success, however, is that it provides Sir Starmer with a
self-justification for a policy of continuing to appease His Orangeness. When
what is needed is a collective approach, seeking to obtain and maintain an
individual advantage over what used to be called our partners doesn’t look like
the approach most likely to bring about any change.