Rough Trade

Ben Wildsmith

It is only in retrospect, when its time has passed, that the absurdities of a fashion become apparent.

Yesterday, as Donald Trump prepared to detonate an explosion under the world order, the voices of the UK’s liberal establishment were revealed in all their brittle petulance.

LBC’s James O’Brien, who once sounded so sharp and convincing when opposing Brexit or criticising Boris Johnson, was peeved. He conceded that on Tuesday’s show, he’d failed to get to grips with Trump’s trade strategy.

He’d had a think overnight, though, and was now in a position to cast light on it for his listeners. Trump is ‘a bully’, he explained, who is imposing tariffs on the world, ‘because he can’.

In a monologue lasting just shy of an hour, O’Brien’s final conclusion was that ‘Mango Mussolini’ ‘just liked hurting people’.

After Trump’s announcement that UK goods would be taxed at 10%, the lowest rate imposed on any country, The Guardian wondered whether Keir Starmer’s offer of a meeting with King Charles had persuaded the president to go easy on us.

At the heart of both these points of view is an assumed superiority. Ten years on from losing the Brexit campaign, liberal Britain still views any deviation from its orthodoxies as evidence of wickedness or stupidity.

So, let’s start with where those orthodoxies have led us.

Tiananmen Square

When, in 1989, tanks rolled on to Tiananmen Square and extinguished hopes of a democratic China, the free world was left with a dilemma.

The Reagan/Thatcher doctrine that free trade is, of itself, an engine of peace and prosperity had run into a brick wall of authoritarianism.

Faced  with a choice between suspending trade with China until it democratised or continuing to open up regardless of human rights concerns, western governments stayed silent.

As in all matters, the markets would decide. From that point forward, the fate of industrial workers in Europe and the USA was sealed.

The undoing of democracy is that people eventually vote for cake and cake arrived in the form of cheap Chinese consumer goods. Whilst supermarkets filled up with £9.99 DVD players, our industrial heartlands fell into terminal decline.

Deskilled

Our workforce, derided as lazy and over-unionised, was deskilled as production needs were met in Chinese factories where workers live on site and nets are installed to catch those attempting suicide by jumping from windows. ‘What can we do?’ our governments shrugged, ‘The markets have spoken.’

During the first week of his second term Trump professed an admiration for Ronald Reagan but tempered that by opining that he was ‘horrible on trade’.

To the best of my recollection this is the first time that any American politician has taken this position, outside of those on the extremes of the fringe left. The notion that government exists to serve free trade has gone virtually unchallenged on both sides of the Atlantic for the best part of half a century.

Nobody of working age can remember anything else.

‘The Markets’ are presented as a faceless force in our lives. Politicians explain to us, as Rachel Reeves has recently, that their ‘hands are tied’ by potential market reactions to political decisions.

The markets become ‘nervous’ or ‘restless’ if changes to the status quo are suggested.

We are encouraged to imagine market activity as beyond the control of democracy, or perhaps even humanity. It sits above us like the weather, or perhaps a capricious god demanding the sacrifice of your skilled job or disability benefit under threat of societal collapse.

Even the identifiable players in the ‘the markets’ are absolved of any ethical obligation to the rest of us, being legally bound to maximise profits for the institutions they represent.

‘I wish I didn’t have to force the closure of your steel works, mate, but it’s my fiduciary responsibility. Sorreeeeee….’

Wealth

So, for half a century, wealth has flowed inexorably away from working people towards institutions and the investing class.

As our workforce has been demotivated and deskilled, working-class communities have become poorer, unhappier, and exponentially more expensive to administer.

Entire sectors have sprung up to meet the needs of communities in crisis, skimming yet more coin from the civic purse and thus exacerbating the root cause of the problems they purport to address.

All of this was clearly apparent by the time Bill Clinton came to power in America and yet more so when Tony Blair arrived in the UK. The electoral rejection of the Republicans and Conservatives suggests that people knew things were going horribly wrong.

The hollowing out of industry in favour of a ‘service economy’ baked in low wages even when private investment swelled the top line of GDP.

New Labour’s response to this was to accelerate the process. The fast money provided by liberalising trade and facilitating public/private partnerships allowed remedial action to be taken on public services, temporarily cushioning the harm being done to communities by economics that had no place for them as generators of wealth.

Crumbs fell a little more frequently from the City but decline became endemic.

The failure of opposition parties, and their media counterparts, to challenge the fundamentals of the Reagan/Thatcher approach to economics created the impression that democracy was a futile exercise.

Instead of being a conduit for the concerns of the people, elections allowed for nothing more than a reshuffle of management and refreshment of presentation.

Rhetoric became emptier, ambition atrophied, and ideology came to be seen as a vulgar relic of the past.

Thatcherism and Reaganomics, which a few years previously had fizzed with ideological zeal, became the reflexive, unchallenged way of doing things.

Serious people didn’t mess with the tenets of the free market, the argument was over.

Mortgage rates

But it doesn’t work, does it? There are two United Kingdoms, one in which house prices soar, dividends roll in, and early retirement beckons. The rest of us are on hold at 8.00AM hoping the GP can see us, fighting for resources at school on behalf of our kids, and terrified the mortgage rates will go up again.

Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. So, the abject failure of ostensibly liberal politicians to address the structural failures of western economics has left an opening for anybody who will.

Trump’s actions yesterday are, on the face of it, a reassertion of national democracy.

You can, it turns out, use a democratic mandate to upend the comfortable arrangements that international finance has arrived at in pursuit of unending revenue.

If you believe Trump, then tariffs will force investment into the USA which will reindustrialise with shorter supply chains and a rapidly reskilling workforce.

You don’t have to believe Trump, though, to recognise that his actions have revealed the professed impotence of recent governments to be a lie.

Anything is possible in a democracy as long as it is mandated by the people. Whether this works, fails, or proves to be another Trumpian confidence trick, the cat is out of the bag.

Change can happen if politicians are willing to insist on it.

Mark Carney

Much has been made of the contrast between the vulgar, bellicose Trump and Canada’s urbane, PhD-educated Mark Carney. For the liberal media, Carney is a comfortable figure, the sort of calming presence that suggest their own agreeable existences might go on forever.

Have a think, though. Carney is an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, the institution which has done more to silently euthanise the industrial heartlands of the west than any other.

He has progressed seamlessly from there to becoming Governor of the Bank of England and is now Prime Minister of Canada despite never having been elected to anything at all.

If you are clogging up social media with your fears about the future of democracy whilst harbouring warm fuzziness for the Carneys of this world, you might need to recalibrate your compass. I know I have.

Trumpism is more than likely a blind alley that many Americans will come to regret.

It is, however, proof that alleys exist, that the motorway of neoliberal economics has exits.

We should be reorganising our politics around that happy revelation.