The UK government says it wants good relations with President Trump, yet many of their words and deeds set out to disagree with the new US Administration. They should next week change their tone and priorities, and seek to create more common cause and joint action with Washington.
They should abandon the costly and dangerous draft deal with Mauritius. They should tell the US their naval base will stay safe in our hands. They at the same time save UK taxpayers billions.
They should agree with President Trump that it is time to negotiate a peace in Ukraine. The Uk and EU do not have the money, military resource or will to replace the US in supporting the Ukraine war. The UK should be as keen on peace there as President Trump instead of appearing to disagree and to prolong the war and increase the deaths. Of course the UK and US must be strong for Ukraine to improve the terms.
The UK should back increasing NATO spending on defence and confirm its own increase to 2.5%. The UK should tell the President in private why 5% is not realistic.
Instead of threatening President Trump with the EU over trade, the UK should present the US with a draft Trade Treaty improving mutual access and lower tariffs. The UK is well placed to avoid general US tariffs and to sidestep a possible EU/US trade war, as long as it shows it is willing to work with the new Administration.
January 19, 2025
Good advice but what is Machevellion Meddlesome Mandleson’s briefing. Our administration have a penchant for screwing up everything they touch. They have set the tone for future UK/USA relations with their disdain for Donald Trump. Lets watch them and their CS string pullers wriggle. No doubt Nigel will keep us well informed.
January 19, 2025
If we are to look for the U.K. Government to “change their tone and priorities” could they include towards us here at home as well as the U.S.A. please?
President Trump has enjoyed more success in foreign policy before even taking office (with the Israel, Gaza, Hamas deal now concluding) than Biden has seen in four years that have been punctuated by dither and embarrassment. It must be doubted that Trump eagerly awaits advice and support from Starmer, Lammy and Mandelson, particularly if they parrot E.U. positions.
Could we be told why 5 per cent. of G.D.P. defence spending is impossible or would it upset us too much? (I bet the Chinese and Russians know anyway.)
Reply 5% spend requires UK and most NATO members to more than double the budget. How would you want taxpayers to pay a bill for another £50 bn a year?
January 19, 2025
To reply:- Well ditch net zero and most of the other lunacies of this appalling, regulate and tax to death government, to pay for it. Alas our defence management is so poor most of the expenditure will be wasted on the wrong things like our two sick joke Aircraft Carriers without sensible aircraft one of which seems to be only used for spare parts for the other.
January 19, 2025
In these days of rockets and drones They are sitting ducks!! The old Ark Royal had a gun fore and aft that auto responded to aircraft not having the correct responder — thats far too slow for modern armaments.
Why are the upper ranks so far behind these times?
January 19, 2025
Reply : “How would you want taxpayers to pay a bill for another £50 bn a year?”
Cancel Net Zeo.
Reply I have consistently recommended ending CCS, net zero subsidies, but we need to do that to get the deficit and taxes down.
January 19, 2025
Far too sensible Original Richard.
The Eco Nutters and virtue-signallers in the British Establishment don’t have an ounce of commonsense between them.
January 19, 2025
No shortage of vast government waste often doing net harm that could so v. easily be cut out. It is almost every where you care to look.
BBC News seem most excited about the first Carbon Capture system on a ship! So would carbon capture on a ship make any sense? Obviously not as A. A bit more CO2 is not a real problem anyway but a net good. B. It will waste much of the energy from the fuel to capture and store the CO2, C. If you want to capture CO2 it is far cheaper to do this on land at power stations so rationally do you do those first. D. It will cost a fortune and make these ships uncompetitive with the others not wasting their money…
January 19, 2025
R to R,
Simples, they need to stop spending on idiot inspired policy. Nett Zero, Nett Zero payolla overseas, Overseas Aid , support at home of those who have found an alternative to work, and the ever increasing cost of immigration both legal and illegal. Raising tax or threatening it, is a lazy politicians cop out.
January 19, 2025
To Reply: then they should not have thrown what defence they had down the drain. They chose to be defenceless with all that implies.
Why should American taxpayers pay for the Germans to sleep soundly in their beds?
January 19, 2025
Labour are inept at diplomacy and much else. President Trump will be able to place or leave his military hardware wherever he deems he needs to do. Imagine Keir Starmer with his sleeves rolled up trying to expel USA presence from Chagos.
Jeremy Corbyn armed with a spear in a canoe might have more traction.
Every country’s defence should be based on what it needs. Some plimsoll line using a % of what its GDP happens to be defends nothing other than dodgy statistics.
Trade is commerce, and commerce is exchange. If what we offer has high value for its consumers, they will make sure they pay for it.
January 19, 2025
Good morning.
I would worry more about what the administration of President Trump says and does rather than that of our government.
January 19, 2025
we should encourage tarrifs to be proportional to the pollution, child labour, intellectual property theft, quality of justice, safety regime, in the country being traded with. we should abandon free trade ideals, given so many countries abuse these things.
our ambassador to US, and their staff, should be people who have worked in the US in the private sector.
January 19, 2025
What has happened to your resolve to support UKRAIN? We cannot negotiate with Putin, he must be comprehensively defeated. Either we defeat Putin now, or he will soon re-arm and start a new European war having had the opportunity to rearm. Notoriously, Treaties made with Russia are simply disregarded when they become inconvenient.
Reply You are unrealistic. Neither the UK nor the rest of NATO ever wanted a war against Russia over Ukraine. Only if NATO joined the war on Russia would Russia be decisively defeated, with risks of huge damage and casualties. I have always supported the policy of not committing UK forces to this conflict. Peace will depend on NATO clearly planning to fight should Russia invade again. Russia does understand the importance of the NATO guarantee which is why Putin attacks non NATO members.
January 19, 2025
Trump should go in hard. Tell Putin that if he doesn’t withdraw his forces back to Russian territory then Ukraine will be saturated with military hardware and given unlimited logistic support. He may not actually have to do it, just convince Putin that he will.
The war with Ukraine is ruining Russia. It’s no picnic for Ukraine either.
Putin will just scoff at any weak response, such as Biden offers.
January 19, 2025
So Trump should just tell ‘im? Ha ha ha. You really need to do what Trump has done, and get a reality check on what’s actually happening in Ukraine. NATO has been pumping Ukraine up with military hardware and providing it with logistical support for three years, and still it’s losing. The Russians know that the West hasn’t got the resources to keep on wasting its armaments and throwing good money after bad. The USA has other fish to fry, and so do we. Not that you’d know it, from the idiotic nonsense that Stamer has been spouting lately.
January 19, 2025
😂🤣Russia is booming! A new oil pipeline being built via Azerbaijan to Iran. Their trade has not been inconvenienced by the 16 rounds of sanctions – Germany on the other hand is finished!
Do you know that Zelensky had the biggest standing army in Europe, fully equipped by NATO – NATO countries have almost nothing left, I’m talking money, armaments. We fought this war with everything we have – we don’t have standing armies and the U.K. soldiers are leaving as fast as they can. Our military can’t recruit – do you want to be conscripted to fight on the Russian Steppe? I will pay your fare.
January 19, 2025
Not just unrealistic there is far too much MSM misinformation that led to that conclusion. Building Putin up to be something he is not doesn’t help the discussion.
Putin is not the problem here – It was the Americans aided by oppressive elements in Ukraine that started this war.
January 19, 2025
R to R
The EU offered Ukraine enhanced membership of the EEA, a precursor to full membership. Membership that has at its core close military cooperation. Russia was always bound to act as they saw it as a direct threat to their security. Similar to that the USA took over Cuba.
January 19, 2025
Sir John, below is the text of a letter I have sent to our local newspaper, the Maidenhead Advertiser. It is not as wildly off your topic as may seem at first sight because the last line dismisses a “low value trade deal with the US” aoong with two other proposals as solutions to our long term problem of suppressed economic growth since the 2008 global financial crisis. Interestingly the US economy appears to have recovered from that crisis, while economies on this side of the Atlantic, including ours, have not – so what have the US authorities done differently, and could we learn from their experience?
“Sixteen years ago, on January 19 2009, the late Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that he had set up an “Asset Purchase Facility”.
It was to be managed by the Bank of England, and at that stage its mission was to buy up illiquid commercial assets using money provided by the Treasury.
However that quickly morphed into the Bank creating new money and using it to buy up government bonds, “gilts”, from the very liquid secondary market.
Given that the Treasury continued to issue new gilts in parallel to the Bank mopping up previously issued gilts, in effect this was a scheme to rig the market.
Why was that necessary? Because the previous Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had been over-confident about future growth of the economy and tax revenues.
Consequently, when the global financial crisis struck in 2008 the government soon found itself having to borrow a quarter of all the money it was spending.
At its peak in 2022 the Asset Purchase Facility held £875 billion of gilts, and last November it still held £655 billion, about a quarter of all the gilts in issue.
This must easily make the Bank the government’s largest creditor, which raises questions about which body now has greatest control over economic policy.
The plain fact is that the UK economy has never fully recovered from that 2008 crisis; its previous trend growth rate of 2.5 percent a year has been halved.
But what is the solution? Certainly not cosying up to China, or negotiating a customs union with the EU, or seeking a low value trade deal with the US.”
Reply. The US Central Bank also bought up huge quantities of US state debt and allowed or created a big inflation there as here. If you read my analyses you would see the main differences between the US and UK leading to different growth outcomes are tax levels, regulation, cheap energy and attitude to the digital revolution. Both sides of the Atlantic had bad Central Banks. The Bank of England in the last two years is the worst with its unique and bad policy of selling bonds in the market at big losses.
January 19, 2025
Kiev has refused to negotiate with Russia. Russia sees no point in discussions with European governments. That’s for the reasons you give, Sir John, and also because of their previous duplicity following the Minsk agreements. So that leaves only negotiation between Russia and the US as the way to peace in Ukraine, and I hope it will come soon, for the sake of all the people suffering in that unfortunate country. Britain will be a spectator and that seems fair enough to me. We never had any business to do with Ukraine in the first place.
January 19, 2025
+1. I hope we don’t do anything foolish to upset the peace talks. I hope we steer clear of sabre rattling with Macron & the EU.
January 19, 2025
Revisionism. Zelensky was negotiating with Putin and, it seemed, close to a deal …… and then Al Johnson was sent to Kiev to scupper it.
January 19, 2025
Starmer did not receive an invitation to Trump’s inauguration. Farage and Truss did. This calculated insult does not bode well for the “special relationship”.
Biden already seriously damaged America’s relationship with Britain, by approving the sale of a squadron of F-16 jets to the new management in Argentina. And providing the finance.
January 19, 2025
Would you invite to your big do someone who insults you? That is what Starmer and his crew did again and again to Trump.
In any case, 2-tier Keir is too busy elsewhere on the international stage, just recently posturing in Kiev as the would-be saviour of that failed state. If attended an event and stood anywhere near Trump, he would look like the political pygmy he is.
January 19, 2025
On the contrary, it bodes very well indeed.
Unless of course you think a Labour Party, which is overloaded with extreme Lefties who spent the four years of Trump’s last Presidency making ridiculous over-blown insults and childish stunts like Khan’s Trump Balloon when he made a State Visit, is capable of maintaining a “special relationship.”
January 19, 2025
There is no “special relationship”.
US Presidents will always put American interests first, which is what one would expect. If the UK Government wants to be listened to in Washington, then first it needs something useful to say. If the UK wants something from Washington, then it needs something they want in exchange. If you can’t say or offer anything useful, then don’t expect very much in return. That is the reality of our relationship.
January 19, 2025
When it comes to insults I think the Labour Party and the likes of our PM got in there first, and quite below the belt they were. To label a man a literal NAZI and to humiliate and degrade him in his last term in such a childish way was always going to come back on them. Such fools we have.
January 19, 2025
The UK should do the things you suggest, because they are in our interest.
Unfortunately our government (and its many supporters on the opposition benches) has its own ideologies, which are not popular with the people it governs because they are not in our interests. From uncontrolled migration to Net Zero to DEI to authoritarianism, they make our country a worse place. We can’t just blame parliament either; the regime is made up of a large portion of the educated class, found in the blob.
The new US administration knows this: there are very strong parallels with what they have just experienced under the Biden regime. I hope they make it plain that any pain they cause Britain is because of our current rulers’ policies, so our public blame our rulers rather than the US.
January 19, 2025
With 2TK in charge probably none of that will be done
His priority is getting back into bed with Brussels
Signing a trade treaty with the US would put him at odds with rejoining the single market which is this ultimate aim.
Nothing thos government does will be for the benefit of Britain
January 19, 2025
The key issue for this Labour Government is none of these. It is not what is best for the national interest of UK nor what is mutually advantagous for the UK jointly with the US. All of that is secondary to Labour’s consideration of its standing in socialist Woke Left international fora, specifically the Socialist International and the Progressive Alliance.
Reeves and Starmer would rather impose tariffs and NTBs on US imports in solidarity with the EU than agree a trade deal with Trump’s America.
Rather than deal with the hated Trump, Labour is more likely to take the UK into a leadership position in either of these Socialist organisations and from there by the backdoor into the EU.
January 19, 2025
After the last few weeks of the Government desperately trying to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius before Trump was in a position to stop it, and Sir John’s statement that it was senior Foreign Office Mandarins pushing the deal who will remain in place, why would the USA ever “trust that their air base is safe in our hands?”
I expect Trump will broker a deal between Putin and Zelensky fairly swiftly and I doubt whether he’ll bother to consult Starmer. Why would he when he has Nigel on speed dial?
Two-Tier has gone out of his way to offend Trump and is busily cosying up to his beloved EU, in an attempt to rejoin-in-all-but-name.
He is going to wreck the best chance we have of a decent trade deal with the USA and therefore rescuing our economy before it finally goes down the black hole the Not-a-Conservative-Party and Rachel-from-Accounts have created.
In short …. he will do the exact opposite of what is in the interests of the UK …. again. He’s the WEF’s Manchurian Candidate.
January 19, 2025
@Donna – +1
“Two-Tier has gone out of his way to offend Trump” along with the UK and its People. Personal ego before duty yet again by the corrupt
January 19, 2025
+1
January 19, 2025
Unfortunately none of these are likely to pass because the UK government is driven by an ideological need to rally against capitalism and capitalists, embodied in the Trump administration. Perhaps focus on the reverse, viz what the Trump administration can do to help us remove them to avoid the damage they’re causing to US businesses investing here, and to US defence assets?
January 19, 2025
There is an interesting article by Shanker Singham here:
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/what-should-the-government-seek-from-the-eu-reset/
“What should the government seek from the EU reset?”
Which actually starts:
“The government’s EU reset cannot be looked at in a vacuum and needs to be placed in the wider context of the UK in the world. Recently, the UK concluded its agreement with the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – probably the most significant trade move for post-Brexit Britain.”
“There has been for some time a battle for the world’s operating system – the system of laws and regulations that governs the flow of goods and services. It is not, as some believe, a battle between competing blocs – typically the EU, US and China. Rather it is a battle between two fundamentally different approaches. The first approach is the one on which the world trading system and WTO has been based – that of regulatory competition with mutual recognition and equivalence. This is the CPTPP model, and because the US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) is based on CPTPP, it will likely form the basis of any potential deal the US offers to any other party.”
“So what can the UK government do? Again, no choice needs to be made between the US and EU (or China for that matter). It is possible for Starmer to do a USMCA-like deal with the US, provided he maintains two things – an independent trade policy and regulatory autonomy. “
January 19, 2025
Yet again Donna’s nailed it.
January 19, 2025
Strangely that was the gist of my comments a couple of days ago that didn’t make it past review.
We should be asking just why Europe is so keen to prolong the war when there have been ample opportunities for diplomacy to take over.
I can think of at least 1 reason.
With Trump in the Whitehouse we do at last have a chance that sense will prevail and the war will come to a conclusion.
The MSM is responsible for much of the misinformation about this war and the reasons for it – None of the big papers ever did an honest report on what started it, being too content to follow the Biden lead to mask what was happening. It was so much easier, and no doubt more profitable, to paint Putin as the bad guy.
January 19, 2025
All so glaringly obvious reasons why we should recognise the reality of our most important strategic partner,, but Starmer would rather prioritise his Lefty looney party and Davos WEF cronies than listen to reason .
January 19, 2025
@Ukret123 +1
January 19, 2025
Sir John
Agree with all your thought here today
January 19, 2025
Sir John
It is about time UK Governments started to realise we live in a big World and it is all remote from the EU, it is also a World free of the UK’s Net Zero punitive punishment Laws. A World where what ever the regime first and foremost put their own Countries and People first.
January 19, 2025
We have to hope President Trump is able to “convince” our Eco Lunatic Establishment that relying on windmills and solar panels isn’t a good idea.
Gridwatch at 1030 this morning:
Gas: 21.52 GW
Nuclear: 3.51 GW
Biomass: 3.13 GW (chipped trees from the USA, shipped here with diesel power … oh so “green” – NOT)
Inter-connectors: 4.86 GW
Hydro: 0.52 GW
Wind: 2.79 GW
Solar: 0 GW
We obviously need far more windmills and solar panels.
January 19, 2025
From a Far Left position where invalid foreign courts and organisations are more important than the will or prosperity of the British people our reverse Midas “Make Britain Pay” PM will have no wish to work with President Trump. Expect to get excruciatingly biased US/Trump reports daily from BBC News for the next 4 years.
January 19, 2025
“The UK should back increasing NATO spending on defence and confirm its own increase to 2.5%”
A great deal of nonsense is talked about defence spending. The objective should be to define what the UK needs to spend to provide our country with effective defence as decided by our politicians. For far too long, politicians have demanded ever increasing tasks of our military without providing the right level of resources.
I would ask the defence chiefs to come up with a series of proposals for different layers of defence :
1. UK, only plus our IT infrastructure under the sea and the Falklands etc, including our nuclear deterrent.
2. 1 plus defending Europe and the sea lanes for our trade across the Atlantic, and from the Middle East.
3. 1 and 2 plus playing a role in supporting the US in the Pacific in support of Australia, Taiwan, and Japan.
Each proposal would include manpower estimates, equipment required and costings.
It would then be up to Politicians to decide what they wish to defend, knowing what it would cost. They would need to be honest for a change, and tell all of us what they want to defend and if, as usual, they want it done on the cheap, they would need to explain how that could be done and at what additional risk to our servicemen and women.
January 19, 2025
Cringe time again – I hate it when I see advice coming from retired seniors that we should sidle up to the Americans to curry favour – have we lost all sense of ourselves? also that old chestnut about our special relationship exists only in our own minds – the Americans know nothing of it – and why did we ever ‘take back control’ if only to give it away again to the showman Trump and don’t forget he’s only going to be there for four more years – we have a much longer way to go and surely should be looking at something very different.