The prime minister is considering retaliation against the United States after giving up hope of avoiding tariffs due to be imposed by Donald Trump on Wednesday. Sir Keir Starmer is right to hit back, unfortunately, because that is the only language that the US president understands.
Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, has demonstrated that standing up to President Trump is the way to persuade him to engage positively. On Thursday, Mr Carney – who is in the middle of an election campaign – tore into the US president, saying that the US was “no longer a reliable trading partner”, and that Canada’s old relationship with the US, “based on the deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over”.
On Friday, he was rewarded with a telephone call which Mr Trump afterwards described as “extremely productive”. Mr Carney said that, in it, the US president “respected Canada’s sovereignty”, which had not always been the case in conversations with Justin Trudeau, his predecessor, whom Mr Trump, in a mocking reference to his desire to make Canada the 51st state of the US, used to call “Governor Trudeau”.
“I’ve always loved Canada,” Mr Trump told reporters after the call – not that he loves it enough to lift the tariffs he has already imposed on the country, or to lift the threat of further tariffs to come, including those on car imports that will also be imposed on Britain on 2 April.
As our political editor reports, at the beginning of last week there had been optimism in 10 Downing Street that the United Kingdom would avoid the tariffs planned for Canada, the European Union, China and the rest of the world. There was even a hope that a very limited quick-fire trade deal might be completed before Wednesday, which Mr Trump insists on calling “Liberation Day”.
Those hopes have now evaporated, leaving the chancellor braced for the destruction of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts within a few days of their publication.
The only hope that remains is that based on the experience of Mr Trump’s first term, when the tariffs that he imposed tended to be limited and of short duration. It is not clear whether the president knows perfectly well that tariffs will raise prices for US consumers, but that those consumers, as voters, like the rhetoric of socking it to “unfair” foreign competition – or if Mr Trump genuinely believes that free trade is against America’s interest, and has in the past been talked out of doing too much harm by his advisers.
Either way, we can only hope that he retreats from a full-blown trade war this time, as he has done before. In the meantime, it makes sense to adopt a robust posture towards him, as Mr Carney has shown.
Sir Keir should make it clear that he cannot allow US firms to have low-tariff access to the British market if British firms are being shut out of America. It may have no basis in economics, but if it is the way to convince Mr Trump that the UK is not his doormat, then needs must.
The prime minister is right to stand up to Mr Trump, while at the same time continuing to pursue a special US-UK trade deal. The British position does not have to make sense: it just has to match Mr Trump’s combination of bluster and sweet talk. With any luck, the US president will feel that he has made his point with his domestic audience and can move on.
