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Tariff-busting idea to save Britain

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Trump has announced some punishing tariffs that will affect China and India very badly. We are talking 30%, 40% and more. EU countries are being charged 20%.

Meanwhile, thanks to Kier Starmer’s tough stance against the big fat bully, the UK percentage is at the lowest end – a meek, simpering 10%.

So here is my idea. We get Mr Bates to set up a huge post office in somewhere like Stevenage and invite the whole world to send their US-bound goods to us. We will charge them 5%. We then slap a Union Jack on the boxes and send them on the States.

Just totting up some numbers here, global trade from China to the US totals 500 billion dollars a year. Our 5% facilitation fee would bring in 2.5 billion US dollars from China alone.

Would this break some kind of international trading treaty/protocol? Maybe. So what? We’re in a different world now.

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  1. After thinking this through, I think this might be a bit reckless. After all, Trump will soon cotton on and then slap a huge tariff on the UK – d’oh!

    Except…we are dealing with Trump here. We could give him a piece of the action early on by agreeing to paying him a personal cut via one of our handy-dandy tax havens. He wouldn’t object then!

    Would this break some kind of international law? Yes of course it would. But again, so what?

    I am joking of course – but I honestly wouldn’t be at all surprised if something like this happens. Do you remember how Boris’s mob immediately looked to monetise the COVID crisis? That’s peanuts compared to this opportunity!

    • I am someone who occasionally has to send goods of very little intrinsic value to the USA. There is a ridiculous amount of paperwork needed already, can’t imagine what it will be like for large corporations.

      Surprising that Canada (and Mexico) weren’t mentioned yesterday. There are already some tariffs in place, but I think more were expected. Of course he could just do another announcement today or next week.

      The only good thing to come from his sabre rattling with us is it looks like new PM Carney is going to win the election in 3 weeks. A Liberal win seemed all but impossible just a month or so ago with slimeball tory Pierre Poilievre previously looking a shoe in with Trudeau very unpopular in large parts of the country

  3. I couldn’t watch his speech for more than a few minutes because his awfulness hurts my brain, but reading some follow-up reports today has been enlightening and alarming.

    It seems that he has applied tariffs on islands off Australia inhabitated only by penguins, but none on Russia nor North Korea (although I do wonder whether NK exports anything to the US).

    Obviously, given who’s in charge, the tariffs will probably change altogether or be removed in a few days or weeks. But I hope Americans realise soon that Trump is perhaps not the best manager of their economy.

    • British Indian Ocean Territory (ie Diego Garcia) is inhabited solely by US and UK service personnel. Norfolk Island is part of Australia (as are the penguin islands) yet has a way higher tariff.

      There’s a theory going round that it’s calculated on trade gaps rather than actual tariffs, but as far as I know the Heard and McDonald Islands export nothing to the US unless the penguins are smarter than we know.

      All the UK has to do is abolish VAT on US imports and the tariff will vanish. Teriff.

  4. I think Rachel Reeves can rest easy and give us all a tax break now. The UK exported £60bn to the US last year, and from Saturday it will go up to £66bn. Break out the bubbly!

    I’m not an economist though, so I might be wrong.

    Yourhomeandallitscontentsmightbeatriskifyoudonotkeepupwithrepayments.

    • It’s better than that. It’s an import duty so the US revenue gets it. So they can then fund tax cuts to rich people while the general population soaks up the inflation.

  5. Was that tariff thing he held up during his speech even accurate? I know a little about tariffs on various food products and the numbers he showed that U.S. products are charged coming into the EU don’t make sense. If they are including taxes it’s misleading because everybody pays those.

    • I gather that it was a combination of actual tariffs charged on US exports plus seemingly randomly applied penalties for other, non-tariff trade barriers. For example, “your food standards don’t allow chlorinated chicken so we’ll call that a tariff of, say, 5%”. I’ve read and listened to a fair amount about this today (Business/Economics teacher so I feel obliged to at least try to understand), and this is the closest I can get to understanding how the figures on that chart were calculated.

    • Who buys shit American products in Europe? In Canada, because of our climate, we are kind of forced to buy some things from our southern neighbours.

      • I’m seeing a lot of offers for flights to various parts of the US and apparently, flights from Canada are down 70% over a similar period last year. Add in the consumer boycott of booze etc and it’s got to start hurting soon. I’m trying to avoid buying American products where possible as well as avoiding BP garages after they pulled out of green energy. I know oil companies are all pretty bad but that announcement was just taking the piss.

          • Me neither. I have tickets for a concert in Saratoga Springs in NY in August. Can drive there, but as things stand I will cancel and sell the tickets.

            I only live about 45 min drive from the border and have often had packages delivered to a place just inside the US when it is much cheaper to do so or said package cannot be shipped to Canada. This place has just closed down, I wonder why?

  7. There’s a private group on Facebook called reform party group which claims it’s a benefit of brecksit that we only have a 10% tariff as the EU has been hit with a 20% tariff and its all thanks to nigel and nothing to do with Starmer.

    I’m not sure if it’s a spoof page but I doubt it.

          • Without the US no EU possibly.

            The formation of the European Coal and Steel Community was advanced by American Secretary of State George C. Marshall. His namesake plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II contributed money to the Europeans, helping to feed Europeans, deliver steel to rebuild industries, provide coal to warm homes, and construct dams to help provide power. In doing so, the Marshall Plan encouraged the integration of European powers into the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to present-day European Union, by illustrating the effects of economic integration and the need for coordination.
            The potency of the Marshall Plan caused former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to remark in 1997 that “America should not forget that the development of the European Union is one of its greatest achievements. Without the Marshall Plan it perhaps would never have come to that.

      • Yet a candidate who managed to bankrupt a casino FFS, not to mention his other multiple failures, was voted in. Did they really think he was competent and trustworthy? I’ve heard this debacle described as America’s Brexit and there are certainly similarities with interested parties saying, “I didn’t think he meant what he said” or “I didn’t think these policies would apply to me.” Well, now they know.

      • A lot of these people voted for Trump because he was going to hurt the ‘right people’. Now their poisonous, ignorant stupidity has blown back in their faces. Fuck them

      • Spare me the sanctimony.

        I don’t like to see anyone lose their job. I’ve faced it myself, and I suspect unlike you, also had to layoff people on several occasions. It’s a shitty, miserable thing to have to do, and I won’t ever forget it. Over a quarter of a million people have been laid off by Musk under the remit given him by Bonespurs.

        You want perspective?I met one 2 weeks back, the father of a colleague who had given 25 years to the US education system, who found out he was fired when his building pass stopped working. It’s shattered my colleague, and shattered her family. He’s expendable because his work focused on kids from low income areas that struggle to stay in school, and this administration is more concerned with banning books and pro nouns than actual learning. His dismissal is totally illegal under NYC law, but he now has to decide whether to deplete his savings taking DOGE to court, or use them to bridge the years until he taps into his pension – which lost about 15% of its value today when the markets shat all over the tariff lunacy. He worked with the sort of kids Vance writes about in his book and has now totally sold his soul in order to get his day in the spotlight.

        Bonsespurs actions are going to visit economic hardship on millions, many of whom had no say in his election. I’m sure that not all 900 were Trump voters and I’m sorry for those that didn’t. But for those that did are getting what they actually voted for, rather than sappy soundbites the orange one serves up. They wanted him in charge, now they have to own what comes with it. It’s called consequences.

        • Of course they didn’t actually vote for losing their jobs. They could be misguided, or they might have felt that they had a duty to vote in an election where the options were dismal, and thought – rightly or wrongly – Trump was the least worst.

          Liberal contempt for working class people – vote for us or we will laugh if your life gets worse – is manna to the far right.

          • No, they didn’t vote to lose their jobs, they voted to destroy other peoples jobs, mass roundups and deportations, the gutting of Medicaid and social security and all the other horrors that Trump and his cronies openly boasted were going to happen. This isn’t contempt for working class people it’s the natural satisfaction of seeing the biter bit

          • I doubt anyone here would look someone who’d just lost their job in the eye and say this stuff. I like to think not, anyway.

            The internet is perfect for easy political tribalism. Score points, nod along, vent your ire, bask in the warm glow of approval. Fuck the other side.

            It’s the same tribalism that makes a Trump presidency possible in the first place, two equal and opposite reactions sending us ever further down the rabbit hole.

  13. So, if you take the difference between the goods that flow into the U.S. from a particular country and then the goods that flow out to that country that apparently (as a %) is what the Trump team deem to be the current ‘tariff’ for that country. It’s fucking insane. Basically, everyone in the U.S. will now pay significantly more for products that the U.S. can’t actually produce. Coffee and bananas have already been mentioned as good examples.

    DOW closes with its highest loss since 2020.

    I suspect there will be some backpedaling in the coming days.

  15. Is he going to cave, though? Or, in his mind, reverse the decision after some further thought? Even he must see the carnage he’s causing. And he frequently does spin on a dime and not follow through.

    It’s long been said, often by me, that he’s a loon, a sociopath with some deeply embedded grievance against everyone and everything. But he must have an aim to all of this? What is it? Is it just spite at being laughed at since he tried to become the real estate king of Manhattan? Is he actually an asset of a hostile power? Is this a plan for him and his cronies to buy back cheap then reverse the tariff policy and become trillionaires?

    Is it all of that? Combined into one fat pile of awfulness?

    I think it is. There will be blood on American streets before the mid terms.

    • I’m a long way from being a psychiatrist, but my two-bit diagnosis is that he wants to be either the richest or most talked-about person in the world.

      He seems to be obsessed with money to a wildly unhealthy degree. Who else would allegedly over-charge their own bodyguards to stay in their hotels? What other Western leader would sell their likeness on so many collectible coins, cards, digital wotsits, etc.? And even though the US is the richest and most powerful country in the world, he still talks about it being plundered by much poorer nations.

      I imagine that he’s going to cancel or lower some tariffs soon, but he will claim that he’s won a great victory for America, he’s punished other economies, etc. He’s incapable of saying “I made a mistake”, so even if the US economy collapses, he’ll just throw a minion under the proverbial bus and carry blithely on to the next 5-minute wonder.

  16. Interestingly I’ve just been reading an article that the tariffs may have been generated by AI and not as thought on the back of a fag packet.
    From The New European.

    But the mystery of why global trade is being disrupted in this specific way deepened, because several social media users independently noticed that if you asked various AI tools to work out a fast way to set global tariff rates for the US based on already existing data, they came up with something that looked almost identical to what the Trump administration produced.

    That alone is nowhere near proof that a 30-second AI answer was used to upend global trade, but it is alarming enough that the question can be asked and not immediately dismissed. The possibility also becomes that bit more intriguing when another observation is added – several of the entities given their own specific tariffs are not independent nations (like our penguin-occupied islands), but are instead part of, or territories of, larger countries.

    This mystery was solved by online sleuths who worked out that the tariffed entities mapped on to top-level web domains (like .uk, or .fr) rather than a list of nations – which once again adds credence to the theory that it was generated by something quickly grabbing a list from an online source. It also tallies, once again, with how most commercially generated AIs would answer this question.

  17. This has been doing the rounds – as if Boeing weren’t in enough trouble already. I think Trump’s just handed the world airliner market to Airbus, particularly since they have a factory in the US.

    View post on imgur.com

    Turns out that around 50% of all US imports go into the manufacturing process. Oops.

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