Sounds like he’s been played
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
12 points (100.0% liked)
UK Politics
3580 readers
223 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Played is a bit strong.
Everyone including starmer had a pretty good idea what trump would do.
But pissing him off has no possible positive. So playing along while trying to form deals else where is really the only option.
Its not like we can force trump to be reasonable. Replacing the US as a trade partner while hoping they fix their democracy. And keeping as much of an allied status untill then. Really is all the UK can do ATM.
Tariffs harm UK trade. But they also harm US customers. At a time when the US has the same cost of living issues we do.
Dispite trumps dumb mathematical claims. We import more per person from the US then they do us. So responding in a tarrif war will lose our gov more support then him.
It is a trade war where you and me choosing to boycott US products is way more effective to the UK then expecting our leaders to try and lay down the law.
Avoiding big US names harms trumps funders with way less harm to our econ long term.
Edit: this means dump coke pepsi(walkers as well) apple, amazon, google, etc etc.
Trumps maths forgets his own parties funders refuse to manufacture in his nation. Him or us applying tarrifs have no effect on most big US corps that fund the GOP. Because we do not actually import their products from the US. We just send profit to the corporate overlords.
Boycotting the US companies manufacturing and selling outside the US to avoid taxation and high labour costs. Harms his party.
Daft question, how much do we actually sell to the US that tariffs will hurt?
We have a huge satellite parts industry (huge gdp wise) we also sell arms tech. Mainly armor for assets. But on the more consumer level. Spirits and intellectual properties music chip design rf techs etc.
We import way more then we sell on a per capita basis. But trump seems to do his maths on a $ for $ basis where any lower population nation will look like they don't buy as much from the US as they sell. Hence why canda is also in the tarrif attacks.
It sounds like everything that we sell to the US would sell well in the EU in the coming years, what with Germany stepping up military spending, and alternatives to Starlink getting pushed hard.
For all the world, this looks like Starmer desperately not wanting to have to publicly say, "Brexit kneecapped the UK and we need closer ties with Europe ASAFP".
As for starmer and brexit. Yep you are correct.
But the nation is not readdy to admit it yet. The numbers are still close to 50% either way. And its not just tory voters that support it.
Unfortunatly the crap " no voters failed to back us up" still appelase to far to many brexiters
So yep getting in with the EU is our only option. But any gov fighting for it will drag us back into split parliments that cant agree on anything trade related.
Agreed. We already do. Less then we did. But still sizable