At the beginning of a crisis, actions always trail behind events. In autumn 2007, as the first bank run for 150 years began, Gordon Brown refused to nationalise Northern Rock (fearing it an “Old Labour” remedy). By the following year he had taken the commanding heights of the banking system into public ownership. In early March 2020, as the worst pandemic for a century began, Boris Johnson declared that it was “business as usual” and reacted with libertarian incredulity to calls for a lockdown. A few weeks later he was amassing emergency powers and ordering the UK’s “free-born people” to stay home. Even as a new world comes into being, politicians cling to the old one. They, like us, are creatures of ...

The question every finance minister, factory owner, stockbroker and person who uses money to buy stuff is trying to answer is whether Donald Trump’s tariffs are permanent. Will he back down on his huge wave of tariffs once other countries drop their own tariffs on American products? Or is protectionism the point? Team Trump itself does not seem to know. Each day more loyalists start to sound as if they hope the president is lying but fear he is being honest. Advisers look scattered during interviews trying to explain the strategy behind these tariffs. As markets crash, the treasury secretary Scott Bessent has spent a week evading questions with the nonchalance of someone who has not been the treasury secretary during ...

A few weeks ago, a reporter asked President Donald Trump whether he was still going to impose tariffs on Canada. A simple “yes” would have sufficed, and been terrifying enough; but Trump being Trump, that question was enough to inspire a long and rambling answer which strongly implied that Canada was not actually a real country at all. His response brought to mind Vladimir Putin’s ominous 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukraine”. The bit that jumped out at me, though, was this: “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the US, just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago.” In ...

It’s a long time since the Scottish left found its home amid the clangs, sparks and shouts of the nation’s ship and steelyards. In today’s economy of professions and services, of university graduates and the technological juggernaut, leftism has become a middle-class pursuit. It is, largely, a hobby of the urban sophisticate, more likely to inhabit a spacious Glasgow tenement than a modest council house, whose hands remain wholly uncalloused. Eye strain is the greatest risk posed by their day job. But the high-water mark of this modern caste has also passed. It encapsulated a decade that took in the independence referendum, with its exultant gatherings and angry slogans; the Jeremy Corbyn years where, for the briefest of periods, it seemed ...

It was both predictable and predicted. Donald Trump, a politician often defined by his unpredictability, is on some questions almost maddeningly consistent. Trade policy is one of them.  “Liberation Day” wasn’t months or years in the making but decades. It was in 1987, as Trump first pondered a bid for the presidency, that he published an open letter in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. “To The American People,” it opened portentously. “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.”  Trump proceeded to argue that tariffs would allow his country to “end our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who ...

It is all the Office for Budget Responsibility’s fault. This, plus Rachel Reeves’ rigid fiscal rules, has become the fashionable explanation for our economic travails. Were it not for these, it is argued, the government would not be announcing painful welfare cuts and could be investing in the future. For the most part, it is an argument advanced by the political left, but by no means exclusively. There are those on the right who are sceptical of a George Osborne-era institution and who bemoan the self-imposed constraints on government policy. Not least among those critics is Liz Truss, which should give others pause for thought. The cause of the recent criticism of the OBR is that its judgements on economic growth, and ...

A decade ago, the Liberal Democrats fell victim to the “black widow strategy”. Having mated with Nick Clegg’s party for the purposes of coalition, the Conservatives then devoured them. Twenty-seven Lib Dem seats – West Country fortresses thought impregnable – were won by a majority-bound David Cameron. This electoral shock cast doubt on the party’s very existence. In 2010, Clegg had aspired to break the Tory-Labour duopoly and become prime minister. By 2015, he had too few MPs to fill a committee room (eight). But the Lib Dems are now enjoying glorious revenge. At the last election they won 60 seats from the Conservatives – not only reclaiming their West Country heartlands but advancing through the Tories’ own. South-east voters repelled by ...

Should Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course host the Open in the next few years? The US President is golf-daft, and yet the top-level Scottish course hasn’t been home to a major since he bought it in 2014. The politics of such a decision manage to be both simple and complex. First Minister John Swinney has, sensibly, said he wants to work with the Trump administration to enhance Scotland’s interests. He recently met Eric Trump, the President’s son, at Bute House, where the pair discussed the family’s business interests in Scotland. As world leaders have learned, Trump senior appreciates nothing more than flattery and obeisance. If you want something from him, you have to give him something in return – the art of ...