A LibDem Perspective - Appeasement doesn’t work!
A LibDem Perspective
Appeasement doesn’t work
Pay the blackmailer, the playground bully, the social media ‘sexting’ intimidator, the narcissistic wannabe dictator, and they will keep coming back for more.
Months of ego-stroking culminating in the supplicatory hand over of the King’s state visit invitation has to date proved a pointless national embarrassment. We have been punished with the same basic tariff as Iran, Afghanistan, and previously unknown penguin-populated islands. By contrast Russia’s $3bn p.a. of exports to USA attract no additional tariff, nor does the $21m p.a. from Belarus. Meanwhile Services, where there are big surpluses in the US’s favour, have been ignored in their calculations simply because it suits their narrative to claim they are being exploited.
But the apparent concessionary 10% just relates to the ‘general’ tariff. Our biggest export to the USA, cars and car parts, attracts the ‘global’ 25%. Medicinal and pharmaceutical products are our second biggest sector but we don’t yet know whether they will be spared. So, to date, the constant (and derisory) claims of a special relationship have gained us nothing. Suggestions abound that for us as for others, submission might be rewarded, but resistance will certainly be punished.
What threats will come after these tariffs? Accept US meat products that have been produced without any of the safety or welfare standards our farmers have to comply with? Rescind the Online Safety Act and cancel the taxes on social media giants? Give free rein to hate speech and holocaust denial? Wind back our promotion of renewable energy? There is no end to the potential demands.
Bullies fear strength. In contrast to other UK parties, LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey has called for a global ‘coalition of the willing’ in trade as in Ukrainian defence. Restricting retaliatory tariffs to US goods while reducing trade barriers and building up trading relationships with the EU and around the rest of the world would isolate the USA and strengthen global alliances.
In just a few days businesses around the world have lost trillions of pounds in value, threatening jobs, incomes and pensions. The threat of global recession looms. Businesses and governments are unable to plan. Meanwhile the US leadership embraces economic disruption, the world’s richest man appears to take delight in the chaos, and the ‘MAGA’ movement has seen the USA become a global pariah. There are even signs, at last, that US electors are starting to recognise that they have been misled, with the President’s approval ratings at historic lows for such an early stage of the administration.
Liberal Democrat MPs are pressing for any US trade deal to be debated in Parliament, such are the longer term implications for our economy, our jobs, our pensions. We cannot allow ourselves to be bullied into submission. Neville Chamberlain was the last Prime Minister to try appeasement on such as large scale, and we know how that turned out.
Cllr Kathryn Field