Trump can save Britain from the tsunami of Chinese tat

Telegraph

12-05-2025

How many dolls does a child need?
'I don't think a beautiful baby girl that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls,' says President Trump. 'I think they'll have two dolls, and the dolls will cost a couple of bucks more,' he elaborated. A few days later, he'd raised this to 'three or four'.
For this observation, he was widely vilified. Trump was a 'toy snatcher', according to one academic. A Guardian columnist declared that what he really feared was femininity, claiming 'they want you, and your kids, to be poor, desperate and ignorant'.
The libertarian editor-at-large of Reason magazine, Nick Gillespie, sneered: 'Same energy: Trump on dolls, Sanders on deodorants. Horseshoe theory in action'. Ergo, Trump was a closet socialist, too.
This punch failed to land. Typically words like 'three dolls is enough' can be heard from some hysterical hair-shirt ascetic on BBC Radio Four, such as George Monbiot, insisting too that we don't 'need' to take an overseas holiday, or eat meat.
12,000 years ago, such people would have been telling us off for extravagantly decorating our caves, or lighting a fire to keep warm. But toy rationing obviously isn't Donald Trump's belief.
What he does have is a peculiar genius for articulating something we all know to be true but don't like to say out loud. What's the point of buying 30 dolls if they're all rubbish, and each one breaks within a few days? As consumers, we've chosen to binge on quantity, not quality – on Chinese-made tat, substandard or dangerous products.
Our homes have become temporary staging posts for goods on their way to the landfill. In Trump's words, we're buying 'junk'.
Meanwhile, and this is not a coincidence, our own industrial base has withered away. Trump is hoping that American manufacturing responds, and makes more dolls, and much else besides. It costs a little more, he argues, but maybe the products will be better.
This is a problem recognisable to many readers. One Christmas some years ago, I explained in this column how we'd chosen to buy a badge-making machine for my then-tweens. We opted for a model from eBadges, a husband-and-wife firm in Lincolnshire that had reshored manufacturing back to Britain.
It cost around £60, a tenner more than the Chinese competitor on Amazon. But there was a number to ring with a human at the other end, and every part was available as a spare. They told me how they would receive distraught calls from buyers of the Chinese models, which had broken down: no spares, no support, we're sorry.
I'm delighted to say the firm is still going – as is our badge machine, and my child's online shop.
Trump is inviting us to consider just what kind of bargain we have been getting. Some costs just don't show up straight away, but years later. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in The Telegraph a year ago, China's 'exorbitant overproduction' now threatens the social market model in Europe, because of 'strategic over-investment' designed to crush our economic base.
Another cost is the vast welfare and health bill that comes from turning an industrious working class into an idle underclass living in broken communities – treating post-industrial ailments ranging from obesity to drug dependency.
'It barely staunches the bleeding,' argues the SDP leader William Clouston. Britain may as well have kept its factories open.
Free trade could once claim immense moral righteousness. In 19th-century England, Robert Peel removed tariffs on imported grain to make bread cheaper and improve the lives of millions.
His resignation speech in 1848, which you can read online at Hansard, spoke of 'those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow' receiving 'abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice'.
Trade is good, but the utopians have been living off stolen valour for decades. The 29 th doll that a household purchases is not quite the same as cheap bread was to a hungry family in Salford 180 years ago.
Maga advisors think that we buy a lot of Chinese goods simply because they are cheap – torches that break after a couple of weeks, chargers that are unsafe, EVs that you can't get insured.
Even more profoundly, Trump is challenging the utilitarian logic that underpins not only free trade but open borders, too. The logic of globalisation was that we were getting richer in the aggregate, so we must stop complaining. That logic is collapsing before our eyes.
Another lesson we can take from the badge machine is that buying something is not merely a transaction, but an investment in the future of the supplier. China's strategic bet is that we don't know this, or don't care – that we just can't resist a bargain, and that we rationally will always buy the cheapest good regardless of quality or the consequences.
'Junk' has two meanings. British merchants once helped get China hooked on opium, and now they've got us addicted to bargains.
I think Donald Trump has got lots wrong on trade, and he may also be wildly over optimistic about the ability of America's atrophied manufacturing sector to recover.
But he's right in asking that we look to ourselves for the cure. Or as Trump himself said: 'Don't feed the beast'.