Starmer's trade deal spin has just been brutally exposed

Telegraph

18-07-2025

Sir Keir Starmer's decision to stand up in front of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) workers in its Solihull factory and promise to protect their jobs from Donald Trump's trade war looked like a strange one from the outset.
For a start, if the Prime Minister had been paying the slightest bit of attention, it was plain for all to see that JLR was a company in deep trouble. Tariffs were just the latest problem it faced, along with parts shortages and the huge costs of going electric. And that was before a disastrous woke rebrand cratered sales.
The idea that Starmer could swing the pendulum sufficiently to ensure continued employment for JLR factory workers against such a grim backdrop is only mildly less ridiculous than the suggestion that the Prime Minister is in any position at all to guarantee that anyone's job is safe, whether it's mine, yours, or somebody else's.
And so it is, with an overwhelming sense of inevitability, that JLR has announced plans for hundreds of job cuts just two months after Starmer's preposterous speech in the West Midlands.
Make no mistake about it: this is a spectacular embarrassment for the Government on multiple levels. Never mind that he was allowed to go up there in the first place and make such utterly hollow claims. Starmer deserves all the humiliation that must follow such a breathtaking display of arrogance.
But this is about far more than Starmer's humbling, it's what it says about the future of manufacturing in this country under the dead hand of Labour that really counts.
It is a reminder too that for all the Government's attempts to paint its trade deal with America as some sort of triumph, that what Starmer came away with was really nothing of the sort.
Quite the opposite in my view.
True, we're better off than our estranged European cousins, but it's still much harder and more costly to export to the US than it was previously. So Britain isn't better off than it was before tariffs came in, it's just less worse off than others.
In the case of the car sector that means a 10pc levy, which is disastrous for JLR given that the US is its biggest export market by far.
No doubt the Government of course would love for everyone to blame all of this on Trump. But the truth of the matter is that no amount of leniency from Washington can counteract the economy's underlying weaknesses under Labour or its repeated missteps.
JLR can hardly escape criticism of course. Its bizarre relaunch risks being one of biggest acts of corporate self-harm ever committed, while the decision to stop selling new cars in the UK late last year as part of its shift towards new electric models is also a huge gamble.
But in all likelihood, it probably wouldn't be making 500 staff redundant if it wasn't so hard to be a manufacturer in this country, or indeed run a business for that matter.
The same goes for all the other major manufacturers that have pared back operations in recent months or in some cases simply shut up shop altogether. The hollowing out of heavy industry is taking place at frightening speed and so much of it, is clearly the direct result of this Government's woeful economic mismanagement.
Ditto the state of emergency that has gripped the high street. Not content with an autumn tax raid which has left retailers grappling with big National Insurance increases, alongside steep increases in the minimum wage and a new plastic tax, the industry is facing another hit from planned changes to business rates.
Businesses are under siege from a Chancellor either unable to make up her mind about how to plug the growing hole in the public finances, or worse, running out of ideas altogether.
Thursday's shocking job figures lay bare the extent of Labour's ruin. The unemployment rate is at a four-year high of 4.7pc – higher than economists expected. Nearly 200,000 jobs have been lost since Labour came to power. To compound matters, companies are cutting back on hiring too.
This is Labour's record in black and white – taxes and red tape are destroying jobs, and yet Reeves has the nerve to tell an audience of City bigwigs this week that 'Britain is better off under Labour'. It's Alice in Wonderland stuff.
With wage growth slowing and inflation rising again – much of it homegrown – it means Britain is effectively on the brink of another cost of living crisis, if indeed it had managed to escape the current one.
Salvation almost now lies in the arms of the equally bumbling bank of England in the form of rate cuts. God help us all.
Manufacturing is no different. It is those same employment costs that have torched other sectors, together with the highest energy bills in Europe, that are crippling industry, so for Starmer to be boasting about protecting jobs when the Government is laying waste to industry is an insult.
Still, at least his choice of audience was somewhat apt – Jaguar's virtue-signalling rebrand suggests management wouldn't know good taste if it painted itself in the same garish colour as the 'Barbie pink' electric car that it has fooled itself into believing younger customers will want to buy.
The long-awaited industrial strategy will help but only at the margins. It focuses too heavily on future-facing industries such as digital technology, clean energy and advanced manufacturing, at the expense of established ones, and contains too few real measures to help those in peril.
A promise to bring down electricity prices for energy-intensive companies sounds like precisely the tonic required until it becomes clear that firms must go through an agonising two-year consultation period merely to determine whether they are eligible for subsidies or not.
JLR's retreat wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last while Starmer and Reeves continue to grab recklessly at Britain's economic levers.