Trump is playing a high-stakes game of international poker
He is right to complain about tariff disparities and to do something about them
Politics
Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
Friday
Ex-Tory MSP joins the Lib Dems
The Scottish Liberal Democrats aren’t best known for their ability to grab headlines – but today the spotlight is on them. At the group’s spring conference in Inverness, leader Alex Cole-Hamilton this afternoon unveiled the latest addition to the party: the ex-Tory MSP who dramatically quit the Conservatives on Thursday after blasting their ‘Trump-esque’ style. Talk about a quick turnaround, eh? Emerging from the shadows, Jamie Greene MSP joked with the Lib Dem membership: ‘I’m not sure who’s more surprised to see me here – me or you!’ Going on, the former Conservative politician and onetime leadership hopeful told his crowd that he had gone from being ‘politically homeless in
Five years on, who is Keir Starmer?
13 min listen
Today marks five years since Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour party. In that time, he has gradually purged Labour of its leftist wing and wrestled the party back to the centre, winning a historic majority in 2024. But, five years on, the question remains: what does Keir Starmer stand for? He came in as the acceptable face of Corbynism but looks more and more like a Conservative with each passing domestic policy announcement (take your pick: winter fuel, waging war with the size of the state, welfare cuts etc.). Internationally, it is a different story. Despite saying little on foreign policy in the build-up to the general election,
China hits back against Trump’s tariffs
Donald Trump has sown the wind – and now America must reap the whirlwind. Beijing has today announced plans to slap an additional 34 per cent tax on all US imported goods from next Thursday. China had already applied tariffs – ranging from 10 to 15 per cent – to a range of American agricultural products after the last round of charges from the Trump administration. But now, after Chinese goods were hit by this week’s hike, taking the rate to 54 per cent (the US had existing tariffs on China), Beijing has delivered fresh retaliation. Export controls have been imposed on seven rare earth elements critical to the production
Will the markets make Trump see sense on tariffs?
This week Donald Trump declared ‘Liberation Day,’ unveiling a barrage of tariffs that had been trailed as correcting unfair trade practices overseas. In a theatrical Rose Garden ceremony, the US president presented a table, detailing a slew of new “reciprocal” tariffs targeting nations right across the globe. A sharp market reaction might lead to a change of heart in the White House Traditionally, trade reciprocity implies matching another country’s tariffs tit-for-tat. For instance, if the UK imposes a 10 per cent tax on US chicken, the US would impose the same import tax on British chicken. Many had anticipated that ‘Liberation Day’ would therefore introduce a complex array of tariffs reflecting
Starmer’s skills adviser founded failing school
There’s a new man about Whitehall. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed Oli de Botton – ex-adviser to David Miliband and the husband of former No. 10 communications chief Amber de Botton – as his Expert Adviser on Education and Skills. The role of the new skills guru will be to advise ministers on the government’s education vision but Mr S is more than a little sceptical of de Botton’s track record in the field. Not least because the adviser also happens to be the co-founder of School 21 – a progressive free school that has produced some rather underwhelming results… Working with ex-Tony Blair SpAd Peter Hyman, the government’s
Are Islamist gangs in control of Britain’s most secure prison?
HMP Frankland, in Durham, is supposed to be one of the most secure jails in the country. The category A prison holds terrorists and murderers, including Soham child killer Ian Huntley. Frankland should be a place of order, where the state is in absolute control. Yet the jail is said to be so overrun with Islamists that inmates who refuse to join their gangs are being forced into separation units for their own safety. Prisoners who refuse to convert to Islam are also being targeted, according to a leading criminal defence barrister who uncovered the shocking allegations on a visit to Frankland. Tony Wyatt told the Times that ‘there are
They think it’s all over for President Yoon – it is now
Yoon Suk Yeol, elected South Korea’s president in 2022, has been removed from office. The Constitutional Court in Seoul has upheld Yoon’s impeachment over his actions in the ultra-short-lived declaration of martial law last December. After lengthy deliberations the court delivered a decisive eight-zero verdict. A snap election must now be held within 60 days with Prime Minister Han Duck-soo serving as acting president in the interim. Yoon’s PPP (People Power party) accepted the verdict and the man himself issued a humble apology to the nation saying, ‘I deeply regret not being able to live up to your expectations. It has been the greatest honour of my life to serve
Labour council tells staff to take ‘privilege’ test
If you thought progressive politics couldn’t get any worse, think again. It transpires that the Labour-led Westminster city council is advising its staff to undergo, er, ‘privilege’ testing and inclusive recruitment training in a bid to hire more people from non-white ‘global majority’ backgrounds. Time well spent… The rather baffling virtual privilege test helps council staff realise their social advantages, with scores impacted by factors including whether your parents read to you as a child or whether you drive a new car or have a designer handbag. As the Telegraph reports, insiders say they would gain privilege points if English is their first language, if they reckon someone could bail
The truth about Israel’s ‘bloodlust’ in Gaza
Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas Strikingly, Hamas appears to have quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. Its fatalities list for March 2025 dispensed with 3,400 names that were contained
Trump can’t ignore the stock market carnage forever
As it turned out, the only thing Liberation Day was actually liberating anyone from was their money. In the wake of President Trump’s imposition of a massive round of tariffs on America’s trading partners the stock market has been in freefall. For the moment Trump is ignoring that. But he won’t be able to forever – a bear market is too damning a verdict on his presidency. You can’t ‘make America great again’ in a bear market Investors, to put it mildly, took one look at the latest round of tariffs, and dumped equities as fast as possible. In the wake of the tariffs announcement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged
Trump has finally ditched Macron for Marine Le Pen
It’s official, the bromance between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron is over. It had always been a rocky relationship but on Thursday it ended in a spectacular fashion. The French president, reacting to Trump’s decision to impose 20 per cent tariffs on all EU products, announced: ‘Investments to come or investments announced in recent weeks should be suspended until things are clarified with the United States.’ A few hours later the American president posted a message on social media in which he reflected on the sentence handed down to Marine Le Pen on Monday. Trump had commented little on her four-year suspended prison sentence and five-year political ineligibility for misusing
Nato must prepare for America’s withdrawal from Europe
Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, has a reputation for genial flexibility and an ability to evade trouble. During his record-breaking 14 years as prime minister of the Netherlands, he earned the nickname ‘Teflon Mark’. But while Rutte has previously demonstrated a rare ability to mollify Donald Trump, is the Nato chief in danger of being too complacent about what the president might mean for the future of the alliance? Rutte has no excuse for being caught unprepared: he came to the job at a highly challenging time, a month before Trump was elected to a second term as president. Rutte, more than anyone in Europe, knew the extent of
Why did Trump throw Taiwan under the bus?
Things could have been very different. Since the distant days of the first Trump presidency, Taiwanese tech companies have been shifting production from China to Taiwan due to US tariffs and tech controls aimed at China. For the US, that strategy has borne some fruit. Most countries tend to trade the most with their close neighbours. But in February, for the first time in over two decades, Taiwan’s top export destination for goods was not China and Hong Kong, but America, thousands of miles across the Pacific. It was a tremendous victory for America on the frontline of the US-China rivalry. Instead, the arrival of that milestone was greeted with
Javier Milei is deluded about the Falklands
Javier Milei might be a Thatcherite economically, but when it comes to the Falklands he’s about as Thatcherite as a bunch of striking miners. In a speech this week to mark the 43rd anniversary of the Falklands war, Milei announced that he would not only fight for as long as it takes to gain sovereignty over the Islands, but that he would persuade the Islanders that becoming Argentinian was actually in their interests. Yes, really. ‘We hope that the Malvinas people will one day decide to vote with their feet for us’, he proclaimed. ‘That is why we seek to make Argentina such a power that they will prefer to
The Katie Lam Edition
28 min listen
Katie Lam was elected as a new Conservative MP, for Weald of Kent, at the 2024 election. While studying at Cambridge she was president of the Cambridge Union and chairman of the Conservative Association, and she was later a special advisor – first under Boris Johnson in the business unit at Number 10, and then later working on counterterrorism with Suella Braverman. In between university and politics, she worked at Goldman Sachs and at AI-specialists Faculty, and she is also an accomplished lyricist and scriptwriter having co-written five musicals. She was appointed a Tory assistant whip last year when Kemi Badenoch took over as leader. On the podcast, Katie talks
Is Hungary right to quit the ICC?
When Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, who is nobody’s fool, offered Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a state visit to Budapest last year, he knew a storm would follow. Netanyahu has now arrived in Hungary – and the backlash has duly followed. Orbán has vowed not only to ignore the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas; he has said his country will withdraw altogether from the ICC. During a joint press conference yesterday with Netanyahu, Orbán said the ICC had become a ‘political court’. Netanyahu hailed Hungary’s ‘bold and principled’ decision to withdraw from the court.
Unlocked was changing inmates’ lives. So why has Labour binned it?
Unlocked Graduates, a charity that recruited hundreds of high-calibre graduates into the prison service, was one of the few glimmers of hope in our broken justice system. But Unlocked’s future is now in doubt: its graduate programme is over. The current cohort of prison officers – who are making a huge difference to the lives of inmates and their hopes of rehabilitation – will be the last. Unlocked set out to transform prison officer hiring – and it succeeded Unlocked’s fate has been clear for some time: last year, the Ministry of Justice failed to renew the programme’s contract. This week, prisons minister Lord Timpson confirmed that discussions on the graduate
South Korea must pick its next president wisely
Over 100 days since his impeachment trial commenced, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol was unanimously voted out by the country’s constitutional court earlier today. This is the man whose presidency will be remembered for his infamous declaration of martial law on 3 December last year. For his detractors, today is a jubilant occasion and a day of celebration. For Yoon’s supporters, however, the court’s verdict predictably was a moment of melancholy. The clock is now ticking, as the country has 60 days to call a general election. Not only is South Korea’s political polarisation anything but ebbing, but voters must carefully consider just how beneficial a pivot in political
Thursday
Trump’s tariffs: madman or mastermind?
29 min listen
President Donald Trump has announced sweeping new tariffs, including a 10 per cent duty on all UK exports to the United States, as part of his ‘Reciprocal Tariffs’ plan aimed at addressing trade imbalances and bolstering American manufacturing. This move is expected to impact approximately £60 billion worth of UK exports, with sectors such as automotive and Scotch whisky facing significant challenges. The UK government, while relieved to have avoided higher tariffs imposed on other nations, is now navigating the potential economic repercussions and exploring avenues for negotiation. Freddy Gray speaks with William Clouston, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), to analyse the implications of Trump’s tariff announcement
