The Guardian view on Starmer’s choices: time to be bold | Editorial
In his speech to the Labour party conference in 2005, Tony Blair used a seasonal analogy to make the case for embracing disruptive but inevitable change. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Mr Blair told delegates. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”Twenty years on, to quote the billionaire US hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, it is the threat of a self-inflicted “economic nuclear winter” that haunts the global economy. Donald Trump’s imposition of swingeing US tariffs has unleashed mayhem on stock markets across the world, upending assumptions governing the world trade order since Bretton Woods. As Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, said at the weekend: “Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last couple of decades has come to an end.”What that means for the Labour government he serves and for Britain is both fraught with consequence and, to a significant degree, beyond Whitehall’s control. Second-guessing Mr Trump’s ultimate intentions – and the political and economic risks that he is willing to take, as consumers suffer the consequences of a trade war – is a futile exercise. But as the White House seeks to bully, intimidate and coerce its way to a new settlement between the US and the rest of the world, the risk of a global recession is clear.What Sir Keir Starmer described on Monday as a “new era” will require strategic boldness from an habitually cautious prime minister. Sir Keir should, for example, now go further and faster to reset relations with the EU, the UK’s biggest trading partner by far. That may involve an uneasy balancing act if EU countries decide to retaliate against Mr Trump, as the government seeks a trade deal with the White House and related tariff mitigation. But the alternative is unsplendid and impotent isolation, and a future “special relationship” with the US that approximates ever more closely to vassal status.Domestically, a reset is also required. Speaking in the West Midlands, Sir Keir announced modest measures to assist the UK car industry, hammered by 25% tariffs on exports at a time when it is also dealing with the pressures of the green transition. The prime minister described this as a “downpayment” on future support. But supply-side plans to relax electric vehicle targets for manufacturers send the wrong environmental message, when what is needed are radical measures to turbocharge consumer demand.The problem, paradoxically for a prime minister who defines himself as a pragmatist, is ideology. As the UK faces potentially huge economic headwinds, Labour’s industrial strategy will need to be bigger, more interventionist and less constrained by the redundant economic orthodoxies to which it continues to pay obeisance. Aspirations to drive significant growth through a combination of budgetary conservatism and deregulation were already looking doomed prior to Mr Trump’s act of sabotage last week. Following “liberation day”, Sir Keir’s ongoing insistence that the government will stubbornly persist with its fiscal rules begins to look like an act of national self-harm.Mr Blair’s old message on globalisation, addressed to post-industrial regions suffering the effects of unleashed market forces, used to be to adapt or face the consequences. As Mr Trump gambles on the fate of the world economy, making up the rules as he goes along, Labour will need to do precisely that, and at pace.
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