Down 3.15 per cent. It’s never a great sign for a politician when they’re sharing the screen with a financial markets ticker. As Rachel Reeves addressed staff at Jaguar Land Rover’s factory in the West Midlands, traders in New York were joining their brothers and sisters in arms around the world and selling everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor.
To put the market movements into some kind of perspective, the US stock market was, on Monday morning, in the midst of the eleventh-worst three-day fall in its history: on that metric, Donald Trump’s tariffs were worse than a global killer disease that kept us all locked indoors for month, but not as bad as Hitler invading France. Not yet, anyway.
How would our government respond? How could it respond? Reeves and Keir Starmer made a joint appearance in front of a knot of car workers, Range Rovers rolling off the production line behind them, with the goal of assuring us that everything was under control, although it wasn’t, and that they had a plan, although they pretty obviously didn’t.
“When Britain talks about economic stability, we really mean it,” Reeves declared Although unfortunately it turns out that others don’t. “What I want all of you to know,” she went on, “is that this government, this prime minister, and with me as chancellor, we have your back.” Which might have been comforting if the obvious follow-up question hadn’t been: “You’ve got us? Who’s got you?”
Down 3.2 per cent, 3.3 per cent, 3.5 per cent. One of the cars behind Reeves had its hazard lights flashing. By the time the prime minister took over the scary number was down 3.9 per cent. This isn’t for a moment to suggest that the collapsing markets were a comment on anyone in the British government. That’s the problem: they were utterly irrelevant in this drama, like priests in Pompeii sacrificing goats in the hope that it would calm the angry god inside Vesuvius. They had made the offering of the state visit, and that seemed to have appeased the smouldering orange man. Now they could point to their actions and say this was why the worst of the lava had missed our economy.
“These are challenging times,” Starmer began, with gentle understatement. “This is a moment for cool heads.” Although unfortunately, again, not everyone agrees on that point. Down 4per cent.
“Nobody is pretending that tariffs are good news,” the prime minister went on. Although, unfortunately, some people very much are, most relevantly the man in charge of assigning them to everyone.
“We have your back,” he assured his audience. “This government will not just sit back and hope.” No? What will it do? Lean forward and panic?
It will, apparently, “seize the possibilities”. This turns out to mean, as it always seems to with Starmer, artificial intelligence. Bad news for creatives: the government has spotted a successful British sector that isn’t completely stuffed by tariffs and decided to smash it up in its own way.
“Our future is in our hands!” the prime minister declared. Although, if the last few weeks, months and years have shown us anything, it’s that it really isn’t.
He turned to the idea of a trade agreement with the US. “I will only strike a deal if it’s in our national interest,” he insisted. What, honestly, are the odds of that being true at any point in the next four years? The “US trade deal that’s just out of reach” has been the great delusion of Britain’s political class for nearly a decade now. Has it really got any closer in the last seven days? Perhaps in private Trump is a thoughtful and generous person, but the public persona of the president is a man who believes that a deal isn’t a deal unless the person on the other side of the table is very clearly a loser.
Other crashes have had the sense of wild chains of events: which institution was going to fall next? This one is entirely manufactured by one man who shows no evidence of understanding what he’s doing. It depends entirely on his whims. The only question is whether he will change his mind. At the time of writing he was addressing the world on the vital subject of the LA Dodgers’ 2024 season. The market had rallied a little, and was now only down 2.3 per cent. Perhaps Starmer should have tried talking about cricket.
