Tag Archives: Sir Keir Starmer

Britain, Economic, European Union, Government, Politics, Society, United States

EU reset: No time for UK passiveness

EUROPEAN REALIGNMENT

FANATICS of Britain’s departure from the European Union have struggled to quantify the Brexit dividend and what benefits it brought, but when Donald Trump unveiled his schedule of global tariffs they finally had a number to point towards. It was the difference between the 20% levy imposed on all continental exports and the 10% baseline figure payable on British goods.

A week later the gap closed leaving Brexiteers melancholic and dejected when Mr Trump reversed his plans. What the tariff schedules will look like at the end of the 90-day “pause” is no more predictable than any other feature of current US policy. There is no obvious concession from the UK government that might induce Washington to lower its 25% barrier against car exports, and the 10% rate on everything else looks non-negotiable.

Meanwhile, dialogue with the EU about closer cooperation continue apace. The UK hopes to have a framework agreement in place in time for a summit in London in May. The primary focus is security, but that is intended to be a forerunner to closer trade alignment.

As an indication of accelerating rapprochement, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has just attended a meeting of EU finance ministers in Warsaw. Plans have been announced for a pan-European defence procurement fund with the UK expressing an interest to be included. There are hurdles still to be overcome but also strong will on both sides to make it happen. It is a measure of how much more constructive diplomacy has become under Labour. No Tory government would have sought such collaboration. Regime change in Westminster made a closer EU-UK relationship possible, then Mr Trump’s rampage of destruction through the norms of transatlantic security and global trade made it urgent.

The Brexit withdrawal treaty and subsequent trade and cooperation agreement were deliberately shaped by Boris Johnson’s government to impede reintegration on any level. Irreversible divergence was the whole point. But, while there is no great appetite in Brussels to revisit the terms of Brexit that damaged British businesses and interests more than the EU, recognition of a mutual strategic interest and a more constructive disposition are necessary. The long-term economic rational is being hampered as the UK continues to operate within red-lines drawn by domestic electoral imperatives.

European leaders fully understand that democratic politicians must defer to public opinion. But with Sir Keir Starmer having earned goodwill through his diplomatic advances, the prime minister’s reluctance to ever challenge the fallacious premises of Brexit, even after winning a landslide general election victory last year, raises doubts about the true scale of his ambition when it comes to the EU reset. That misgiving is magnified whenever British ministers talk enthusiastically about their dealings with Mr Trump, who doesn’t hide his hostility to the European project. Sir Keir insists it is not a binary choice, but it will become one as soon as concessions to the White House threaten to destroy trust in Brussels or further impede access to the single market.

The claim that the UK can be equidistant between Europe and the US may feel like keeping options open, but in Brussels it looks like a reversion to typical British Eurosceptic ambivalence. Sir Keir faces a stark strategic dilemma, and his options get worse the longer he defers the choice.

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Aid, Britain, Defence, Economic, Government, Politics

Labour’s foreign aid cuts: they will undermine security

BRITAIN

THE nature of politics is about choices. Some are forced on governments by circumstance. Others are self-imposed. The Labour Government’s decision to cut the aid budget to pay for an increase in defence spending is firmly in the latter category. It is also very wrong – forcing the world’s poor to pay for Britain’s safety and security. This is a false economy. Cutting overseas aid will make the world more unstable, not less. The very crises that fuels conflict – poverty, failed states, climate disasters, and mass displacement – will only worsen with less development funding. Labour’s logic is self-defeating: diverting financial resources from aid to defence does not buy security; it undermines it.

The numbers tell the story. Despite government attempts to inflate the amounts involved, in real terms the extra £6bn for defence is tiny relative to Britain’s GDP. The UK could easily absorb this through borrowing – especially in a global financial system where pound sterling is heavily traded – or, if the government prefers, through a modest wealth tax. Yet, Sir Keir Starmer has chosen to frame this as a zero-sum game, where aid must give way to security. But why? Because this is not about economic necessity – it’s about political positioning. Labour wants to prove that it can be fiscally disciplined even when the numbers don’t demand it. It wants to neutralise Tory attacks, even when the real battle is over priorities, not affordability.

It is also a move that aligns with Donald Trump’s worldview. The US President wants to close down the US government’s main overseas aid agency, treating it as an expensive indulgence rather than a pillar of foreign policy. A UK prime minister that echoes Mr Trump’s “America first” instincts on defence and aid will likely meet with congeniality. Starmer has been searching hard for common ground since President Trump was re-elected. On aid and defence spending he has found it.

Labour doesn’t just believe in fiscal discipline; it believes that it must adopt financial rectitude and has constructed a justification for that belief. The problem is that by accepting Conservative trade-offs, Labour locks itself into an orthodoxy that it may later need to break. In a volatile world, Britain – outside the EU – must boost high-value exports and cut reliance on fragile supply chains. Even under Joe Biden, the UK was kept out of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which strengthened transatlantic industrial policy. Will Downing Street ever admit that Britain’s real limit is productive capacity and not budget deficits?

Britain’s fiscal constraint is artificial, but its resource constraints are real. Energy, food, and manufacturing are matters of national security, not just market functions. Without investment, dependence on key imports makes the UK vulnerable to supply-chain shocks and price inflation. If every pound spent requires a cut elsewhere, recent announcements by Labour’s Ed Miliband and Steve Reed wouldn’t have mattered.

Keir Starmer often presents himself as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue – claiming to be adapting to circumstances rather than adhering to dogma. Yet, such pragmatism is itself a belief system, one that treats capitalism’s rules as fixed and unchangeable, markets as being beyond politics, and history as a one-way street where past mistakes justify permanent and crippling caution. In doing so, Starmer isn’t just rejecting viable alternatives – he’s rewriting history to suggest they were never an option to begin with.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Ingratiating the unions will lead to ruination

BRITAIN

DURING the election campaign, one of the very few things Sir Keir Starmer was clear about was that the Labour Party had “changed”. He said this even more often than reminding the nation that his father had been a toolmaker.

Anyone listening to this pledge must have assumed that he meant the party had changed for the better: less militancy, more readiness to tackle immigration, being tougher on crime, no rapid resort to higher taxes, and more consideration for the squeezed middle class.

Well, it has been far from that. The “changed” Labour Party has immediately resorted to traditional Leftist policies, from a penal VAT levy on independent schools to promises of higher taxes, based on highly dubious claims of a hitherto concealed £22bn black hole in the national finances. It has begun to sidle up to the EU, giving every sign of stealthy plans to undo much of Brexit. On top of that, it has cynically cut pensioners’ heating allowances, launched a frenzy of green spending, and lit a bonfire of the planning protections which have for many decades helped to keep the suburbs reasonably green and spacious. It all sounds pretty “unchanged”.

But above all Labour has remain unchanged in its treatment of trade unions and their excessive pay demands. There is hardly a militant union which has not received a large bag of taxpayers’ golden mint in the past few weeks, which is why Chancellor Rachel Reeves is now complaining that she does not have enough of our money and will soon be demanding more.

With amazing abandonment, within just a few short days of Labour coming to power, intractable disputes were cheerfully resolved. This was easy to do if you do not care how much it costs. The political benefits to Labour are considerable, especially now it has ended the very unpleasant and dangerous junior doctors’ dispute in England.

Such a primrose path which has started merrily will end in tears and trouble. That is a given. Perhaps Sir Keir and his government ministers have forgotten their party’s own history, and the story of how it was undone in the 1960s by an unstoppable round of pay claims, one group leapfrogging another. This did huge damage both to private industry and the great nationalised concerns which took up so much of the landscape.

Unions today, it is worth remembering, do not have the power, wealth, or strength of their 1960s and 1970s forbears. They tend to pester and annoy the public with short and frequent protest strikes, rather than marathon walkouts lasting months at a time. We should be grateful we are not contending with that.

But even so, strikes do great mischief. They slow down the economy, they can wreck the education of the young, they can get in the way of the very necessary movement of getting people away from “working from home”, and they keep inflation and prices on the boil.

Free trade unions are an integral part of any open and proper free country. But with freedom comes responsibility, and a combination of militant-led unions and an increasingly spendthrift Labour government does not encourage such responsibility.

If he is not careful, the PM will soon find that he has made a rod for his own back. He may think that he can pass on the costs of this policy to hard-pressed taxpayers. But experience shows he will instead destroy the very businesses he needs to pay for his largesse. We need real change before the bad times start rolling again.

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