8 April 2025

Of Truss, Trump and tariffs

Confusion on the right over trade is nothing new.

Before her 49-day stint as Prime Minister saw her forever associated with a wilting lettuce, the food items most likely to be conjured up by the name “Liz Truss” was undoubtedly pork and cheese.

“In December I’ll be in Beijing, opening up new pork markets!” a wide-eyed Truss told the Conservative Party Conference in 2014 before waiting awkwardly for applause. In another moment almost as cringeworthy, the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs also called it “a disgrace” that Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese.

As well as entertaining Westminster for a decade, this one speech reveals the tension when it comes to free trade versus protectionism. Truss both berated Brits for buying foreign cheese and apples while championing the fact that the Chinese wanted to buy our pork. Long before the “cakeism” ideology of Boris Johnson took hold, Truss was exhibiting the same sentiment while trying to figure out her own politics.

Post-Brexit, Truss soon reverted to the free-market instincts of the right-wing think tank scene (most notably the Institute for Economist Affairs) that had nurtured her. As Johnson’s international trade secretary, she signed a trade deal with Japan and worked on the deals with Australia and New Zealand that were completed after she became foreign secretary. The latter two sparked outrage among UK farmers worried about being undercut by their antipodean competitors (a sore topic that came up when I went to report on the race to unseat Truss in her South West Norfolk constituency), but to Truss free trade was an unalloyed good. In her brief time as Prime Minister she tried to make the UK a petri dish for radical free-market capitalism. Protectionism, price controls and trade barriers had no place in her philosophy.

I mention this now not just because the US is currently experiencing its own Truss moment of self-inflicted economic harm, but because her political contortions tell us something about the confusion underway in right-wing political circles in response to the trade war. Even across the Atlantic where any criticism of Donald Trump is anathema to Republicans, tensions are showing. While the US President doubles down on his economic experiment, calling for Americans to “hang tough”, $10tn has been wiped off global stock markets. Elon Musk, up until now Trump’s right-hand tech bro, has reportedly lost $11bn himself and is coming round to a different view. Over the weekend Musk suggested a “free trade zone” between the US and Europe, and on Monday tweeted a video of Milton Friedman espousing the benefits of free trade via a pencil. Truss would approve.

Or, at least, the old Truss would. Today’s Truss has sacrificed her economic principles to go down the Maga rabbit hole. As the markets descended into turmoil on Sunday, she retweeted an account defending Trump, arguing that “Recessions and crises are always the consequence of a previous excess, not the policies that have not even been implemented.” She has had nothing to say in defence of free trade since “Liberation Day”, beyond announcing “Britain should do a trade deal with the US. But do not underestimate how hard the globalist, pro-EU Whitehall Blob will fight it”. That is a fascinating line, portraying a trade deal with the US as somehow not globalist, not to mention using globalist as an insult in a tweet that goes on to defend the UK’s deal with Australia.

If it is difficult to spot the coherence in all of this, it’s because there isn’t any. And while Truss is a particularly extreme example of globalist double-think, the line from the current leadership of the Tory party is no clearer. Kemi Badenoch – who, like Truss, was trade secretary before she became Conservative leader – is currently arguing that tariffs are bad, but that it’s really Labour’s fault for failing to agree a trade deal with the US.

As Keir Starmer was teeing up his response to Trump and government officials were briefing that globalism is over, Badenoch wrote an op-ed for the Sunday Times suggesting the real enemy to free trade was Joe Biden, not the man who has just sent the global stock market off a cliff and wants to put tariffs on penguins. The fact that the Conservative government also failed to get the kind of trade deal called for now, under the presidencies of both Trump and Biden, when Badenoch herself was Trade Secretary, is apparently not the point.

Nowhere in the piece is a robust defence of the structures Trump is tearing down, leading to a three-day sell-off that dwarfs both the 2008 global financial crash and the Covid pandemic. The closest Badenoch gets is the lukewarm line that “Criticising globalisation’s negative aspects doesn’t mean dismantling the entire system.”

Conservatives don’t necessarily have to go out to bat for free trade, of course. You could argue that the British Conservative party is itself the result of the debate about tariffs, when British politics was refigured with the 1815 Corn Laws that restricted the import of cheap corn from overseas (a “that is a disgrace” moment for corn rather than cheese, if you will). And there have certainly been internal divisions in the party post-Brexit, when the buccaneering “Singapore-on-Thames” vision of the UK outside the EU ran up against the more isolationist, anti-immigration one crucial to the levelling up message.

But if the Labour government is struggling to work out its response that stands up for British industries without inflicting further economy damage, it’s fair to say the Tories are equally short on ideas. Lacking consistent ideology, they appear to be driven less by economic principles and more by the vague sense that, since Trump and the Republicans are right-wing and so is the Conservative party, Conservatives should support Trump what Trump is doing. Even if the global rulebook he is ripping up is the one their party has championed for decades. According to Badenoch, all that is “not irrational”. One can only wonder what irrational would look like…

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here