Britain, Economic, Government, International trade, Politics, United States

US tariffs: a show of coercive control

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Intro: President Trump is wielding tariffs not as a policy tool but as an instrument of political pressure – rewarding loyalty and punishing defiance

THERE is a growing consensus that Donald Trump is embodying the French philosophy of Michel Foucault in that “politics is the continuation of war by other means”. Nowhere is this more apparent than his penchant for tariffs. He presents taxing foreign imports as a way to rebuild the American economy in favour of those workers left behind by free trade and globalisation. Quite clearly, he thinks that politics is not about truth or justice. It is about leverage and supremacy.

The UK is learning first-hand that Mr Trump, with his way of dealing and taste for spectacle, is an accidental Foucauldian – using tariffs as tools of loyalty and dominance, even against allies. If the U.S. follows through on Mr Trump’s threat to impose a 20% tariff on all imports, UK growth will suffer. The effect depends on the response. If the UK decided to do nothing that would mean GDP being 0.4% lower this year and 0.6% next. A global trade war would push that to 0.6% and 1%. Either outcome would wipe out the government’s fiscal headroom. The shrinking margins of the UK’s fiscal rules is making policymakers nervous. Trump sees no need to cloak power in objectivity.

His rationale and logic for imposing tariffs is confused. But two things are discernible. One is his self-styled image as the ultimate dealmaker; the man who can turn any situation to his advantage. The other is his view of politics as a means of structuring society to favour one group over another – not just economically, but in terms of legitimacy and who defines reality. Tariffs will probably be lifted if nations accede to Mr Trump’s wishes and, in doing so, reward politically useful constituencies, big tech allies, or his wealthy donors.

All three of these are visible in a paper-thin UK-US “economic deal”, likely to result in the lifting of Trump’s tariffs – if the US signs it. And, if so, that would further open British markets to US agribusiness; end the digital services tax, which applies to companies such as Amazon and Google; and make it difficult to hold AI companies, like those owned by Mr Trump’s ally Elon Musk, liable for harm. The danger is that whenever there’s a grievance, Mr Trump threatens tariffs – then offers to lift them if you do what he wants.

It’s even more blatant with the EU, which is expected to fine Apple and Meta under its digital competition rules. Regulation looks certain to become another front in the trade war. And that is troubling Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

What makes Mr Trump’s “Liberation Day” so dangerous is its scale. In 2024, the US ran a $1.2tn trade goods deficit. Just two months into his White House return, Mr Trump has imposed tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, China, all steel and aluminium imports, and foreign cars and auto parts. Asia will be next, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and Vietnam.

What emerges is less of a trade policy than performance politics – where coercion, loyalty, and theatre converge. This is Foucault philosophy in action: power exercised not through rules, but through disruption and dealmaking that rewards fealty and punishes defiance. Like many others around the world, Britain is navigating a battlefield. Trump is no student of Foucault but he seems to grasp the lesson. For him, war isn’t the alternative to politics. It is politics.

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Britain, Economic, Financial Markets, Government, Politics

Spring statement 2025: A stage built on myths

BRITAIN

BRITAIN is tightening its belt. The chancellor’s spring statement arrives with the gloomy tone of inevitability. Welfare payments for the sick and disabled will be shrunk, and public services from transport to criminal justice face much leaner times. The language is that of necessity. There is no money. The choices are hard, but unavoidable. So runs the rhetorical script.

The notion that painful cuts are inevitable is political theatre and grandstanding. Either Rachel Reeves knows the constraints are self-imposed – or, more troubling, believes they are real. Last October, she announced £190bn in extra spending, £140bn in additional borrowing, and £35bn more in taxes than previously forecast. The Treasury has expounded upon this by insisting “you can’t pour that amount of money into the state and call it austerity”.

Yes you can. Particularly where tens of billions are siphoned off in debt interest to uphold economic orthodoxy rather than meet social needs. The UK now spends more than £100bn a year on debt interest not because it is financially insolvent, but to a substantial degree because the Bank of England is offloading vast amounts of gilts, bought during quantitative easing, at a loss. The Treasury must cover these losses, while the flood of gilts into financial markets drives up interest rates on new borrowing. This is quantitative tightening (QT), with the state left to foot the bill for soaring interest costs and Bank payouts. Nonetheless, the Office for Budget Responsibility assumes that it will continue, locking in high costs.

This is ideology posing as policy. And it’s far from prudent. No money for free school meals or youth clubs, some parliamentarians warn, yet billions pour into the pockets of bondholders, for the sake of “stability”. Ending QT could redirect that money to public services – a better priority than reassuring markets with symbolic gestures.

If the Bank won’t stop on its own, it must be pushed. Under Gordon Brown, the Central Bank gained its independence in 1998 but included a safeguarding caveat: in “extreme economic circumstances” ministers can override the Bank in the public interest. If £100bn in spending isn’t extreme, what is? QT should be paused. The Bank stands alone among G7 peers in actively selling bonds and demanding Treasury cash to cover paper losses. This is self-defeating in a dangerously volatile world. Gilts could be strategically managed. Before New Labour, Kenneth Clarke often ignored the Bank’s advice – and was often right. But such thinking is now deemed heretical in a political culture that treats Central Bank independence as sacred, even when it deepens and exasperates public hardship.

The deeper irony cannot be lost on anyone. The chancellor refuses to raise taxes on the wealthy, will not relax her fiscal rules, and has ruled out borrowing more. So she claims that there is no alternative to cuts. Yet, these are self-imposed constraints – combined with deference to an unelected monetary authority – that sustain the illusion of necessity. Labour has been here before: Snowden did the same in the 1930s, and very nearly destroyed his party.

The spring statement is a performance. She asks the public to accept a diminished state as the result of external forces, when actually it’s the result of internal dogma. Worse, she may believe the script – failing to recall the economic tools once used to steer interest rates, debt, and public investment. Austerity isn’t the price of prudence, but the cost of forgetting. We have a chancellor of the exchequer who wears the mask of making tough decisions, but on a stage built on myths. The better choice would be to trim the Bank’s power, even if the spotlight has been carefully trained away from its damaging role.

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Arts, Books, Environment, Literature

Climate fiction is extolling the real threats the planet faces

LITERATURE

Intro: A newly created award recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issues of our time

PAUL MURRAY, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told a media audience recently that no novelist should ignore the climate emergency: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the essential and vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, the inaugural shortlist has just been announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station (and the winner of last year’s Booker prize); time-travelling romcom “The Ministry of Time” from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller “Briefly Very Beautiful” by Roz Dineen; “And So I Roar”, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s “The Morningside”. All the shortlisted authors are women.

Climate fiction is not new. Some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis include Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, and Richard Power’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town perishing in a heatwave.

The late Ursula K le Guin wrote that the task of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. The purpose of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild and extreme for the realism. As a consequence, climate fiction hasn’t been taken seriously enough. In “The Great Derangement” in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.

Freakish and abnormal weather events are no longer the essence of speculative fiction – “global weirding” is upon us. What was once dubbed “cli-fi” is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.

The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren’t even explicitly about the crisis. Some are hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.

It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. “The Wainwright prize”, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.

Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been cautioning about global warming’s dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven’t listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new accolade is necessary and important. There can be no bigger story.

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