Politics

Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Change Agreement for the second time and reiterated his desire that America should ‘drill, baby drill’. The US president’s decision exposes the naivety of MPs in Britain who, in 2019, nodded through a legal commitment to reaching net zero by 2050, with the hope that it would inspire other countries to follow our example. The Climate and Nature Bill risks taking Britain back to the dark ages In fact, Britain is pretty well alone in voluntarily choosing to ‘leave it in the ground’, as anti-fossil fuel activists like to put it. The US has been following an unashamed policy

Do we have to choose between prioritising European or American trade? Let’s hope we don’t, because we need both. But the question has sharpened this week for two reasons. The less important one is that Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s new trade commissioner, has suggested that the UK might join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention, a group of 23 countries with economic ties to the EU, including Norway and Switzerland, but also Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and so on. It’s not a free trade area or anything like that, merely an agreement to foster trade by streamlining things like rules of origin. Our relationship with the EU will toddle along, but that is

It may prove to be just the first of many screeching U-turns. Whilst hobnobbing among the plutocrats in Davos this week, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has admitted that she may have to tweak her clamp-down on non doms, to make it less punitive for anyone who isn’t British, and happens to have a bit of money, to live in the UK. Sure, it is good that Reeves is learning from her mistakes. The only trouble is it is going to prove a very expensive education for the rest of us.  It is only a couple of months since Reeves’s Budget introduced tough new rules for non doms, but it already

As in a more delirious version of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office, again. In a thinly-veiled attempt to mend Beijing’s relations with Europe, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman commented: “Climate change is a common challenge facing all of humanity. No country can stay out of it, and no country can be immune to it.” Whatever their views on climate change, Europeans and British would do well to realise that decades-long effort to reduce emissions through multilateral deals is over. Continuing on one’s own – after America’s explicit repudiation of the COP framework, and in light of the track record