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There’s something unreal about the British government trying to get on with running things at home while all the time peeping anxiously over the parapet at events unfolding across The Pond. Bear in mind that Donald Trump’s decisions could have almost as much impact on the UK economy as Keir Starmer’s.
Look no further than Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ all bells and whistles set piece speech at the Mansion House last week.
She went big on a shake-up to the rules concerning pension funds. Allowing them to be lumped together means billions could be utilised to further investment in vital infrastructure projects. Hooray!
But the spotlight flipped every bit as sharply onto a rare intervention on Brexit by the Bank of England governor. If the US hits our export market, he argued, we’d better cosy up to Europe pronto.
Naturally, he didn’t put it quite as bluntly as that, but the underlying message was clear.
And the latest figures showing the British economy growing more slowly than expected add to the urgency of keeping our trade figures up.
Unlikely to happen if The Donald carries through on his threat to whack extra charges on everything coming into the US, given that they’re our biggest export market.
Of course he might be a bit nicer to us than to other countries, given the special relationship and all that. But if precedent is anything to go by he probably won’t.
Tony Blair’s old spin doctor Lord Mandelson, in line to be our next ambassador to Washington, is as savvy an operator as any. So if anyone can make a difference it’s probably him.
In his apocryphal way he said last week that we need: ‘To have our cake and eat it.’ But, nicknamed the Prince of Darkness though he is, others say all we can do it hope for the best.
As one weary top boss put it: ‘We’re not in the EU, so we’re getting clobbered on the trade there. We’re going to get tariffs from Trump. I mean, we’re so screwed. We really are.’
Little wonder perhaps that Starmer’s been clocking up so many air miles since he took office. He’s got a lot of bridges to build.
And even though he definitely isn’t minded to go the full monty, or anything like it, in regard to closer ties with the EU, he’s certainly on a mission to ease trade restrictions wherever possible.
If he does get anywhere it’ll have the double bonus of getting business leaders to stop grumbling quite so much about their increased national insurance announced in the budget.
Ministers are meanwhile cracking on with other priorities flagged up during the election campaign. Like sorting the NHS and doing our bit about the climate crisis.
On health, the plan is to bring in publicly available performance assessments, reward trusts that do well with greater freedoms and punish those that don’t – by sacking the people in charge.
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting didn’t pull his punches: ‘Alongside investment must come reform, otherwise we are just pouring water into a leaky bucket.’
And on the need to cut carbon emissions, the tone’s just as strident.
Energy Security Secretary Ed Miliband told cabinet last week that global warming could force more than two-hundred million people across the planet to migrate.
It’d also, he added darkly, lop chunks off the world economy and expose more than half a million Brits to the risk of flooding.
But here, once again, the stateside spectre casts its dark shadow over us, given that Trump regularly describes climate change as: ‘One of the greatest scams of all time.’
Nor does it stop there.
British defence and security chiefs are seriously worried about future intelligence sharing, thanks to the Donald’s wish to put Tulsi Gabbard in charge of all of America’s spy agencies.
Former MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove isn’t mincing his words: ‘This is a maverick appointment. She has no experience of intelligence and security.’
Worse, according to former NATO bigwig Hamish de Bretton Gordon, her past regurgitation of Russian propaganda places her closer to Moscow than London.
And former British Army spook Philip Ingram added: ‘Appointing anyone with zero intelligence experience to be director of national intelligence should be an alarm call.’
But this is only one among many of Trump’s picks that have sent eyebrows shooting skywards on both sides of the Atlantic.
Elon Musk, the boss of what’s increasingly becoming the right-wingers’ go-to platform X and now set to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, was just for starters.
Then came TV presenter Pete Hegseth. This man, who once claimed he hadn’t washed his hands in ten years because he can’t see germs so they aren’t real, is being lined up as Defence Secretary.
Also there’s Matt Gaetz, accused among many other things of sex trafficking a teenager, set to become Attorney General. That’s to say the most powerful lawyer in America.
Another interesting one is Robert F. Kennedy Junior, one of the USA’s most prolific peddlers of anti-vax conspiracy theories, on the basis that they’re linked to autism.
If his appointment gets congressional clearance then he’ll be the new Health Secretary, determined first off to get fluoride out of drinking water, even though we’re told good for teeth.
Curiouser and curiouser. Where will it end? Cheshire cat for Treasury Secretary? Queen of Hearts for Secretary of State? Tweedledum as ambassador to UK? Or Tweedledee? Or both?
Still, if, as some suggest, America hasn’t so much caught a cold as been diagnosed as clinically insane, wanderers can sometimes return to the fold. With a bit of help from their friends.
Take the case of Beans, a ginger and white cat who took himself off for a little walk last month, and got his owners in a terrible tizz when he didn’t come back.
Cara McBurnie takes up the tale, if not the tail (sic) in this case. ‘We searched and searched, looking everywhere. I’ve been out every day looking but thought something must have happened to him.’
Logical, if depressing. But in the event the something that happened to Beans wasn’t all bad.
Kelly Ryan spotted him first eyeing up her her outdoor cat box and a few nights later tucked up asleep there.
‘I just gave him a few biscuits to start with but heard he was going to visit other neighbours too,’ she said. ‘It felt like he was around too much and that something wasn’t quite right.’
So she posted information about him online and a cat rescue charity took him in. They read his microchip, duly got in touch with the McBurnies, and everybody was happy.
They also got lucky, seeing as Beans had somehow managed to travel to his new bolthole in Coventry from his home near Glasgow. Three whole hundred miles away.
How he made it is surely one of life’s impenetrable mysteries. A bit like the workings of Donald Trump’s mind.
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