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Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: If ever we needed an effective opposition to rout Labour, it's now
Is there no limit to the price Britain must pay for having given Keir Starmer 's Labour Party a chance a year ago? This is rapidly becoming one of the worst governments in modern history. Some of its hopelessness and nastiness was predictable. Labour signalled loudly to its more militant supporters that it planned a class-war attack on private education. Other plans were buried deep in the small print. Or they were hinted at by the choice of ministers to carry them out. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, for instance, had disclosed to all who paid attention to her writings that she was gripped by Left-wing dogmas. She professed to revere the Cambridge eccentric Joan Robinson, who spent much of her career admiring the disastrous policies of Maoist China and North Korea. Later we discovered that she was inexperienced as well. Did Sir Keir Starmer realise this, or was he also beguiled by her dubious claims that she had spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England? It appears he has now decided to leave her in place to absorb as much as possible of the derision and dissent which her policies have brought about – a cruel revenge, if so. As her next duty will almost certainly be a huge stealth tax rise, achieved by failing to raise thresholds in line with inflation, he will no doubt prefer to let her take the punishment for that too. But this will not protect him from the general civil war which he began by permitting ill-planned attempts to slash the winter fuel allowance and cut welfare payments. Did he really not grasp that his huge new parliamentary party was full of men and women who are profoundly, emotionally committed to spending other people's money on a grand scale? Perhaps not. Sir Keir's own politics are something of a mystery, even to him. The sense of a man floundering between vague principles and a definite desire to stay in office is very strong. For example, he now says that he deeply r egrets describing Britain as an 'island of strangers', which many took as an echo of the late Enoch Powell's 1968 speech about immigration. He claims not to have read it properly before delivering it – a ridiculous thing for a Prime Minister to say. This retraction of his own scripted words must surely be the end of his attempt to save his bacon by trying to copy Reform UK. He also claims to be sorry about an earlier pessimistic speech about the economy, saying: 'We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.' But do they have anything to look forward to, apart from an intensifying civil war between Sir Keir and his traditionally Leftist deputy Angela Rayner? Sir Keir and Ms Rayner are like two opponents grappling with each other on the edge of a precipice. The danger is that they will both fall together, leaving the country to suffer. As things stand, we could have four more years of this unsuccessful and increasingly divided government. It is vital that those who are opposed to its policies coalesce quickly into a coherent and effective opposition, which can both hold Labour to account and prepare to replace it with a competent pro-British government ready to step in, stop the rot and undo as much of the damage as possible.
Wall Street Journal
13-02-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
‘Reciprocal' Tariffs Make No Sense
At an Oval Office press conference Thursday, President Trump confirmed that he's going ahead with his reciprocal tariff plan. The U.S., he said, will impose the same tariffs on other countries as they impose on the U.S.: 'No more, no less.' That sounds fair—we treat them the way they treat us—but it's actually a terrible idea. It amounts to outsourcing U.S. tariff policy to other countries. They would dictate what our tariffs would be. If other countries put high tariffs on American goods, then we would impose high tariffs on their goods. So much for American sovereignty. So much for deciding what's in our own national interest. The British economist Joan Robinson once said that a country shouldn't throw rocks into its own harbors just because other countries have rocky coasts. The same principle applies here: The U.S. shouldn't have stupid tariff policies just because other countries have stupid tariff policies. A reciprocal policy would enormously complicate the U.S. tariff system. The Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S., which details individual rates on particular commodities, has about 13,000 line items. The U.S. trades with roughly 200 countries. Is Washington ready to impose and manage 2.6 million individual tariff rates? The lobbying pressures for exemptions and exceptions on the U.S. side would be enormous. This would fill the swamp, not drain it. Foreign exporters would go to great lengths either to get their products under a lower tariff classification or to transship them to another country to reduce the duty they would face. Reciprocal tariff systems lead to nonsensical policies. Consider: China exports rare-earth minerals that are essential for the production of many high-technology goods. The U.S. doesn't export such goods to China. But if China were nonetheless to impose high tariffs on them, would the U.S. then be required to impose real prohibitive duties on mineral imports from China?
