Ross Clark

We had the shock of ‘Liberation day’ when punitive tariffs were levied on imports from virtually every country in the world. That was the destructive part of Donald Trump’s trade war. Now we enter phase two: trying to put things back together again. The announcement of trade deal with a ‘big and highly-respected country’ (believed to be the UK) on Thursday morning is significant not just in itself but because Trump added the suggestion that this will be ‘the first of many’. His strategy has become clear: last month’s tariffs were shock therapy intended to precipitate a round of trade deals which would rebalance trade in America’s favour. They were not intended as a permanent fixture – at least not at the levels announced on 2 April. We don’t know the details yet.

Wasn’t a trade deal with India supposed to be one of the big gains from Brexit – an example of how Britain, once free from the protectionist grip of the EU, could go ‘out into the world’ and free up trade with fast-growing economies, rather than be stuck trading with Europe’s stagnant ones? Markets certainly like the Anglo-India trade deal announced by the government on Tuesday. Sterling is up sharply against the euro and the dollar, signalling that investors are feeling positive about the prospects for a freer-trade Britain. Car manufacturers and the Scotch Whisky Association are pretty pleased, too, given that it means the end of punitive – indeed, positively Trumpian – tariffs on UK exports to India. So why, then, have the Conservatives received the news so sourly?

Rachel Reeves may have helped run up a £151 billion deficit in the past 12 months (with a little help from Jeremy Hunt), but for some people it is not nearly enough. A snapshot into Reeves’s world is provided by the Resolution Foundation today, which has claimed that Reeves’s plan for £100 billion of additional capital spending over the course of this parliament will not nearly be enough, and that most of it will simply be swallowed up reversing ‘Tory cuts’. In a report entitled Capital Gains, it says that Reeves won’t really have an extra £100 billion to spend in her spending review; when cuts to budgets are taken into account it will mean only an extra £20 billion of money available.

Never was there more truth in the old adage about every organisation that is not specifically right-wing eventually becoming left-wing. The pay review bodies which are supposed to provide independent advice to the government on public sector pay have become a menace. They have become advocates for trade unions and care not a jot about the taxpayer. Teaching and nursing unions are threatening strikes if the government does not accept the recommendations of pay review bodies. The one concerned with teachers’ pay has suggested a 4 per cent rise and the one regarding nurses’ pay is suggesting over 3 per cent. They may seem modest rises, except that inflation is down to 2.6 per cent and productivity in the public sector has gone into reverse. Moreover, the government borrowed £16.

It’s official: subjecting oil and gas companies to a 78 pence tax rate (which is corporation tax plus the government’s windfall tax) doesn’t increase energy prices in the UK. That is what Ed Miliband told us on Sky News this morning, so it must be true. He will no doubt be hoping that we don’t look at the figures published by his own department which show that gas consumers in Britain pay an average of 10.17 pence per kilowatt-hour while US consumers – where the oil and gas industry is encouraged rather than taxed to near-extinction – pay the equivalent of 4.04 pence. Sky's @WilfredFrost questions the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband on whether UK gas prices would decrease if the tax rate of 78% on energy companies was lowered by the government. https://t.

So, Ed Miliband has relented, and decided that after all it is not a good idea to build his green energy revolution on the back of slave labour in the Uighur region of China. Miliband had refused to back a Lords amendment to the Great British Energy Bill, first reported by Steerpike, which would have forced the putative government-owned green energy company to address the use of slave labour in its supply chains – Labour MPs were ordered to vote against it. Now the Energy and Climate Change Secretary has produced his own amendment to much the same effect.

Compared with the mobs chanting against sunbathers on Tenerife or the new entry fee just to set foot in Venice, Britain’s own war on tourism may seem mild. Nevertheless, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the UK government is ‘sabotaging’ its own tourism industry. In 2024, it says, international visitors spent 5 per cent less in Britain than they did in 2019. The reason for this, it adds, are deliberate policy choices by the government. The end of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, a rise in air passenger duty and the new requirement for tourists to seek electronic travel authorisation – a mini visa scheme – before they travel to Britain have all contributed to the fall.

I guess I must be one of Ed Miliband’s ‘siren voices’. Writing in the Observer today, the Energy and Climate Secretary complains about people he thinks: ‘Would keep Britain locked in dependence on global markets we don’t control. They will also make up any old nonsense and lies to pursue their ideological agenda, the latest example being their attempt to use the crisis facing the steel industry for their deeply damaging agenda.’ He goes on to assert: ‘UK Steel says that it is the “UK’s reliance on natural gas power generation” that leaves us with higher prices than international allies – not too much clean energy, but too little.’ Steady on, Ed.