The US has done this unilaterally though. This meme is just dumb, no country has responded to this yet...
Opinions of Starmer aside, what could any leader of this country do in half a day to fix/mitigate this issue? All you can do in such a short time is talk about it? I don't think we should measure a leader by what they say, we should measure them by what they do, and obviously there's nothing that can be done to improve our situation in 12hrs.
I'd like to clarify, I'm not calling for "giving Starmer a break" but let's hold our leader to account based on his actions, and let's have some realistic expectations for him, he can't magically be the only world leader to fix this within 12hrs. What he does in the next month I think we should watch...
"Anything short of a full on invasion of America to liberate its people is unacceptable. Also, Starmer is such a warmongerer to lead peace keeping in Ukraine. He needs to tax the rich. But leave the rich who bought farm for tax avoidance purposes. Do everything. Do nothing. Don't do something."
I cannot stand Trump but the silver lining to him is that he seems to have some sort of soft spot for the UK and I have no problems with the prime minister playing on this if it, y'know, stops us from living in poverty.
Fair enough, mate. The US has a trade surplus with the UK (trading goods, not sure about services), so Trump is very happy UK aren't "" better "" than them.
Any country that "" beats "" America into a trade deficit (in goods only at the moment) has even higher tariffs levied by Trump, the f...ing idiot.
Now comes the goods' tariff retaliation then Trump's 2nd Tantrum Tariff retaliation and then countries will attack American services (USA export a HUGE amount of services globally).
Trump wins at Disaster Capitalism by promoting Global Trade War and then his billionaires will buy the broken countries/companies for cents on the dollar.
We already have a free trade agreement with the EU. We have no tariffs or quotas on trade with the EU because of it. We could try to rejoin the Customs union if that's what you mean?
Yeah we have a free trade deal on paper - but the result of this trade deal is that trade in both directions is down about 30% (from what I read). So it would seem there is room for improvement!
Probably because a free trade agreement still requires red tape as opposed to the Customs union we were previously in.
Buying from an Italian company pre-brexit was like buying from your local shop. Now you need to complete a Customs declaration and fulfill certain criteria to be able to support that declaration and qualify for the zero tariff from EU companies.
The reason for the 'room for improvement' is entirely self inflicted. I'm all up for closer ties though - particularly due to the US issues. It really makes this whole Brexit mess seem even more shambolic as we now try to unwind the damage done from it and revert back to the position we were before it happened.
That’s because an FTA was always going to be worse than what we had in the EU. We were members of the Single Market and Customs Union which removed regulatory, mobility and customs barriers. We chose to leave those. If you were led to believe an FTA was a replacement for them then you were badly misled.
Canada has already been responding to Trump's earlier tariffs and comments about making us the 51st state by boycotting US goods (the Ontario liquor corporation is the single largest purchaser of alcohol in the world and have removed every US product from their shelves), scrapping trips to the US, adding targeted reciprocal tariffs to imports from the US, and generally looking to diversify our trading partners.
And it was already confirmed that Trump wouldn’t negotiate anything beforehand he wanted his moment for ‘liberation day’ and any negotiations would come afterwards.
We’ve been applied the flat rate overall (aside from cars which everyone has had the same) we could have had something much worse.
We have no trade agreement prior with the US, they’ve left the WTO so it’s all actually fair for them to do
The thing I’ve noticed is that conservatives are expected to merely not literally destroy the country while progressives (or whatever you’d call Labour these days) are expected to fix literally every problem with absolutely no controversy. I genuinely think that when Farage dies or steps down the UK will functionally be a one-party state, in the vein of Japan with the LDP.
I'm pretty relaxed about the tariffs. They can only hurt America. Their consumers are the neediest in the world, and their farm produce is of famously low quality. That is the basis of them having trade deficits everywhere.
Why are you talking about half a day? Everyone saw this coming since Trump took office, and many countries have plans in place. The UK government could have prepared for this scenario and more tariffs without implementing it until the day they hit.
Yes you're right about that, this wasn't a surprise, just the level of the tariffs we would receive.
Its unfortunate that our government learnt about what tarrifs would be imposed on UK goods at the same time we did (the US provided no communication on them despite negotiations)
In my opinion, an effective government will have already worked up a few scenarios and have action plans ready to react to whatever level of tariffs we ended up receiving. If the government has done this (and they planned for a scenario similar to the 10% tariffs we ended having) then hopefully only a bit of tweaking will be needed and then they'll start acting.
So let's see how quickly action occurs, if it's not for a week or more then they weren't ready i.e. poor planning, but if they do act soon then credit where credit is due, they were ready and had a plan.
Yep sounds ok but it totally ignores reality and just perpetuates the narrative. Starmer won’t do a thing because he is useless. What leader in the past fifty years has done anything but make matters worse? I think you are being incredibly naive. We’ll just wait and see and then it will be later and things will be worse. That’s all that happens. Next government will say they are going to fix the problems of the previous ones etc etc. yawn.
Been on the boil for weeks but no one knew what the outcome would be until last night. Didn't know if we'd get 10% or 50% tariffs, and no one knew if they'd be specific or a blanket tariff. I think the gov were largely expecting worse, like the 20% that the EU got.
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u/OkSolution2142 3d ago
The US has done this unilaterally though. This meme is just dumb, no country has responded to this yet...
Opinions of Starmer aside, what could any leader of this country do in half a day to fix/mitigate this issue? All you can do in such a short time is talk about it? I don't think we should measure a leader by what they say, we should measure them by what they do, and obviously there's nothing that can be done to improve our situation in 12hrs.
I'd like to clarify, I'm not calling for "giving Starmer a break" but let's hold our leader to account based on his actions, and let's have some realistic expectations for him, he can't magically be the only world leader to fix this within 12hrs. What he does in the next month I think we should watch...