Ouch! – The UK impact of Trump

Are you struggling to keep up? It's been quite the rollercoaster ride for the last 102 days. Even before he arrived in office, we were all feeling the Trump effect. And whether you like him or loathe him, his team and all its works, one cannot but be in awe of the energy and dynamism the Trump regime has brought to government, with its constant international reverberations. This is quite a damning contrast to the pitiful arrival in office of the Starmer regime, which flopped across the line as the most unpopular newly elected government in UK history and has since bounced from one self-inflicted cock up to the next.

One of the perplexing political issues de jour is how timid the Starmer government is being whilst riding high on an absolutely massive majority, in contrast to how boldly the Trump regime is behaving whilst sitting on a wafer thin majority in Congress. Go figure.

But what is the impact of Trump upon the UK political scene? Let's put aside the fact he has lots of haters. Let's not focus on the comedy gift that His Royal Orangeness is. Instead let's focus on the real hardcore impact he's had so far on the British political landscape, the UK government itself, and all the things that flow from that.

Economic – If you want to understand Trump’s economic policy please don't sign up to Truth Social. That way lies madness and advanced ‘Trump derangement syndrome’. Listen instead to Scott Bessent, Trump's Treasury Secretary, the equivalent of our Chancellor of the Exchequer, only he didn't fake his CV and pretend he was economist. He is a serial hedge fund investor and taught economic history at Yale.

Their economic policy is simple: Wall Street has had it good for decades but now it’s Main Street’s turn. So let's bring all those offshore jobs back to the US from China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh etc and get manufacturing again. That will inevitably cause some short term economic pain, just like it did when Reagan and Thatcher re-engineered their respective economies. But there should be long term gain. In theory.

For the UK, this means we're going to be buffeted by the ripples from that realignment. That may mean international recession sometime soon. We will need to ride those waves.

Tariffs wars – It is one of the inexplicable facts of this moment that the people who most volubly complain about the madness of tariffs are almost always incredibly pro-EU, the chief tariff creator on the planet whose whole gig is bullying everyone else’s economy by threatening or actually applying tariffs. The Trump regime’s play here is to tilt the playing field to their advantage and specifically make offshoring prohibitively expensive to force lots of companies to bring those manufacturing jobs back home to the good old US of A. Trump is using tariffs as a creative negotiating tool to bend everyone else to his will.

For the UK, if we actually want a trade deal with the US we're going to have to sup some painful medicine. Just being British, endlessly bigging up the ‘special relationship’, meekly offering state visits and kissing the presidential behind isn't going to win us any favours.

Defence spending – The Americans are bored of paying for European defence. God knows they've been doing it for 80 years, whilst we all spent our defence budgets on health and welfare while lambasting America for not doing the same. Cheeky.

The UK impact is that we are going to have to spend a lot more money on defence in very economically constrained times. This was just not on Western democracies’ agendas before last year’s Presidential election.

‘Alphabet spaghetti’ world – Trump has declared war on ESG, DEI, 2SLGBTQIA+ (look it up) and ATAILACALOM (acronyms that are increasingly long and cost a lot of money…OK we made that last one up). The point here is that with US government top cover, corporates are quietly defocusing from ESG and dumping DEI commitments. In the USA especially but increasingly here in the UK as well.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling on trans issues, and St Tony of Blair now breaking cover in pointing out that the rush to net zero is fool's gold, it remains to be seen how the UK government will respond to all this.

DOGE and the cost of government – Prior to the US presidential election literally no one anywhere was talking about cutting the cost of government. That’s the sort of mad thing that Liz Truss would get pilloried for. Now it's all the rage right the way across western democracy. Every week some minister from the Starmer regime pops up on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme to boast about their ‘bonfire of the quangos’ and how they can’t wait to cut the civil service down to size. Let’s see how well the civil service defends itself from this political rhetoric; politicians come and go but the civil service sails serenely on, getting larger year on year. Remember, as they say in Whitehall, Yes Minister wasn’t a comedy, it was a documentary.

EU realignment – The more the Trump regime lashes out, the more his European targets huddle together. And therein lies the conundrum for Starmer. With a polarised US and EU, trying to sit on the fence and be best friends with both is going to become increasingly tricky. Starmer was after all the ‘Remainer-in-Chief’ who de facto led the second referendum campaign after the Brexit vote. So his natural inclination is to see how close he can hug the EU, giving away Brexit freedoms he never wanted in the first place, without cheesing off His Royal Orangeness by showering him with Royal photo ops. That will be an increasingly tricky balancing act.

It has been an educative three months watching the impact of one man 3600 miles away change the current shape and perhaps the future of the United Kingdom. Trump is the reverse George III, this time with the Americans throwing their weight around and us having to behave like loyal subjects.