The US will impose higher tariffs on the rest of the world as the President seeks to onshore more investment, The EU is a protective Customs Union imposing high tariffs to keep out foreign food and other items, imposing large non tariff barriers on overseas goods and services. China makes it difficult for foreigners to invest and sell into their market. These large players will end up with more barriers as they act out their trade war.
In these conditions it is unlikely the UK can grow faster by promoting more goods exports. It is made impossible if the government perseveres with dear energy and bans on oil, gas, petrol and diesel cars which have been important exports for us.
So what we should do as part of a Growth strategy is concentrate on import substitution. There some very easy big wins:
1 Lift the ban on discovering and producing more North Sea oil. Cut our oil imports.
2. Lift the ban on new gas production. Slash LNG imports.
3.Require all new military vehicles and ships to be made in the UK.
4.Rescue oil refining by cutting taxes on oil and home production.
5Reclaim our fish and offer support to expand our fishing fleet
6. End the progressive ban and high taxes on making and selling petrol and diesel cars
7. Require anyone putting in solar and wind farms with subsidies to meet a minimum UK content for buying the equipment
8. Exempt new homes built with 90% UK materials and components from Stamp duty on sale
9. Require all public bodies and the Motability charity to only buy UK made vehicles
10. Require the electricity industry to cover an average 100% of UK demand over a year . This is vital to national security as well as lowering the import bill.
May 25, 2025
Good morning.
None of these will even be considered let a lone met. The UK is ideologically, and now legally thanks to the PM giving away just about everything BREXIT wanted to achieve, bound to decline. Remember. We agreed with the EU that we would NOT out compete them, something I do not put down to stupidity or weakness, but malicious intent. This current government is just perusing policies that the previous governments have agreed to.
For things to change we need to look elsewhere.
May 25, 2025
Absolutely no chance of any of these being implemented. This commie government would rather import everything rather than create jobs at home.
Thieves talks of growth and everything she does is anti growth. We’re soon to be inundated with EU youth picking off jobs, getting taxpayer subsidised education or just claiming benefits.
This government is the most anti British crowd you could possibly get and as Obama says, our needs are back of the queue.
May 25, 2025
“This government is the most anti British crowd you could possibly get and as Obama says, our needs are back of the queue.”. The most anti-growth too.
For Growth – Ditch net zero, drill frack and mine, get cheap reliable energy, stop burning wood at Draz, cut the state sector by 50%, ditch most employments and other excessive regulations, cut taxes by 50%, stop all the market rigging in education, health care, housing, transport, vehicles, stop all low skilled immigration, restore a sensible Non Dom status, abolish IHT (to attract capital, businesses, business people… unblock the roads, stop the OTT building regs, relax planning… all but the last one Labour is doing the reverse. Anti-growth in every respect.
Much Talk of bringing back Boris – The man who (with May) was behind the net harm lockdowns, the net zero climate alarmism insanity, the police state, the net harm Covid Vaccines (the vast harms stats. get more appalling by the day), plus he nearly trebled the national debt doing net harm things like lockdowns, vaccines and open door immigration. He is however right on Starmer’s political prisoner Lucy Connolly.
Brexit was at least half botched by Boris too.
May 25, 2025
Starmer seems confused over the cost of his appalling Chagos deal unless he is lying his figures are way out. He did get a B in maths A level (no further Maths) but it should not really be beyond him.
I know JR quite correctly says say A levels and degrees are not everything. A good example is Toby Young who initially got only two duff O levels in Art and English. But still got into Oxford for PPE and is now very sound on most things. Though still rather limited on Stats, Science and Energy but has good people around him at the Daily Sceptic and Free Speech Union.
Listen to The House I Grew Up In – Series 5 – Toby Young – BBC Sounds
May 25, 2025
Kemi comes out for sticking to the two child child benefit cap. Holroyd says we cannot afford it, but they will restore the winter heating allowance. Kemi makes the wrong call. Reform are right we should have child benefit for all children and the winter heating allowance. Just ditch Net Zero (which will save £Trillions alone and make us far more competitive), cut low skilled immigration and do all the other things I suggest…
If we can afford the insanities of giving our fishing away, hotels for boat people, the insanity of net zero and the evil Chagos deal we can afford child benefit for all children!
Reply unlimited Child benefit will be another incentive for large families to migrate here as Kemi set out.
May 25, 2025
@Lifelogic
AGREED…
It should be paid to only (born here? ed) who are uptodate on their NI payments.
etc ed
May 25, 2025
To reply:- yes this is true and large families do tend often to be recent immigrants but I do not think loss of child benefit for the 3rd+ will encourage many to come or deter many many from extra babies. It just pushes larger families into poverty. If you do let them come and stay they should be treated decently if we can afford to. Ditch net zero and get any cost down to 25% most than enought to cover the cost.
If people think you will get rich by having another baby and an extra £17.25 a week they are surely rather mistaken! What is daft is taking it away if one person earns more than £60K yet two can earn £119,998 and keep child allowances. Same for the loss of personal allowances at £100K for one or £199,998 for two!
May 26, 2025
So make it illegal for immigrant families to claim welfare … ALL welfare, including Child Benefit. Why do we want immigrants who can’t support themselves and their families?
May 25, 2025
JR says “10. Require the electricity industry to cover an average 100% of UK demand over a year . This is vital to national security as well as lowering the import bill.”
This needs to be over the year and to cope with seasonal differences as it is not cost effective to store electricity it will demand gas and perhaps coal too.
The enforced Heat Pump EV agenda (if not killed as it should be) will mean we need circa 10 times as much power in cold winter periods and this extra grig capacity. This at times when we will get little or no solar as cloudy winter or at night and often little wind too. The agenda means a vast investment in grid capacity, heat pumps, EVs, generating capacity, back up… just for these winter months this investment them wasted and underused for the rest of the year. Also the asset of the gas grid to be thrown away. Miliband and his team’s agenda is insane, deluded or pure evil. The laws of physics and energy economics will prevail!
May 25, 2025
The agenda should be to frack and use mainly gas heating, petrol cars then no need for the extra grid or generating capacity at all. Far cheaper too.
Electricity demand for a house using gas for heating, hot water and cooking with non EV cars can be as low as 200kwh PA less than £100 PA. For one with heat pumps and EVs cars it can easily be 30 times this average and most of it needed on a few cold winter weeks. As much as 60 times on some of the coldest days. An insane agenda.
May 25, 2025
@Mark B – yes Malicious intent by what is showing up to be corrupt Parliaments and their Governments this century. The have all bought into the cult religion of socialism that is preached when they make their annual pilgrimage to Davos.
May 25, 2025
JR never did crack ‘magical thinking’ and ‘the power of words’.
If you can cause growth by stating that you will have growth with vigour, why do the exponents of this strategy not also expunge war, disease and injustice by stating so with vigour, I wonder?
Kaja Kallis is a great practitioner. You should watch some of her speeches if you want a laugh.
May 25, 2025
I’ve just been reading that BP may scrap the blue hydrogen project in Teesside. Why would you take a relatively stable gas like Methane, strip the CO2 out to make an unstable gas Hydrogen with only half the heating value. This is economics of the mad house. I’m pleased BP are coming to their senses and annoying Milibrain in the process.
May 25, 2025
@Ian; Indeed, it’s become the politics of a mad house, with the inmates holding the keys, glad to see BP and others finally choosing to change a few locks!
But remember, when proportioning blame, all this eco claptrap started when Coal was demonized as a fuel, rather than the byproduct (sulfur dioxide) which could have easily been dealt with either before or after combustion.
May 25, 2025
@Mark B; What Starmer has done was unnecessary but of little real consequence, akin to screwing the plaque on to the Brexit Coffin, the dream of a true Brexit having died with Johnson’s signature on his Withdrawal Agreement.
May 25, 2025
Good thinking, but not in this governments DNA. Let us know when you receive an invite to the Milliband going away party. We might send a bottle.
May 25, 2025
Yes, boundless optimism from our kind host. What’s the saying: ‘politics is the art of the possible…..’
However, looking at the trajectory of this nation’s income v expenditure, the increasing cost of supporting the Ukraine war, the probable shortages of energy then water, the higher costs of daily essentials, I think we should prepare for a ‘winter of discontent’ followed by an early general election.
May 25, 2025
If only your suggestions were adopted! But we all know they won’t be. With 4 more years of this government the UK is going to be a much worse place for most of its citizens. We’ll get poorer, we’ll lose more of our freedoms to government and judicial overreach, select minorities will get ever more special treatment while the majority gets hounded, our public services will get worse. The list goes on. The nation itself will be hollowed out, a client of the EU superstate.
We will need a “Great reset” of our own, to recover from this decline.
May 25, 2025
Britain needs a new Restoration David Starkey on Youtube.
May 25, 2025
+1 LL. Starkey is on the ball.
May 25, 2025
+1
May 25, 2025
In cash terms UK GDP was £2851 billion in 2024:
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02783/SN02783.pdf
Exports to the EU were around £358 billion, while exports to the rest of the world were around £510 billion:
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7851/CBP-7851.pdf
Those numbers may be subject to various minor distortions but they are sufficiently accurate to conclude:
Exports to the EU were equivalent to a little less than 13% of GDP, non-EU exports were equivalent to about 18% of GDP, so foreign sales were a bit more than 30% combined, while about 70% of the economy was domestic.
So the biggest market for UK producers is not the EU but the UK home market, more than five times bigger.
May 25, 2025
@Denis Cooper – trade with World trading blocks is now in jeopardy as 2TK’s arrangements with the EU appear to conflict with formal agreements elsewhere. So expect to see our world trade become less and the forcing us back into complete EU control the excuse to save us…
May 25, 2025
@Ian B; Is it, given the opacity of the UK’s trading figures as we (theoretically) leave the orbit of the EU, and by that I mean there is the possibility that our RotW export figures now include some of our trade with the EU or the EEA/EFTA. Denis is wrong to suggest any distortions are only minor, there is ever chance they are major, in the same way as our pre Brexit export figures were being distorted by the ‘Rotterdam fudge’, UK exports being counted as EU exports (or even those of the Netherlands!).
May 25, 2025
Can you give any statistics to show that the figures for UK world and EU trade are wrong by a large amount.
Looking forward to your reply Jerry.
May 25, 2025
All good, relevant suggestions but I doubt that the Starmer government can connect the dots between the private sector investment needed to implement them and consequential jobs and tax revenues they will likely create. For too long UK governments have been dominated by thinking that high government spending funded by high taxation and borrowing is the answer when it is manifestly obvious that the opposite is required. Until there is change the UK will continue its downward spiral to third world status.
May 25, 2025
All very sensible suggestions Sir John, which is why the anti-British Government in Office will completely ignore them.
However, we can all individually decide to support British industry and producers and I think I saw that in action this weekend when a mobile Brixham Fisheries van, which visits a local town once a week, was completely sold out by mid-day.
Support our farmers and fishing industry and Buy British whenever you can. Unfortunately, I will find it very difficult to reduce my purchases of EU goods from “almost none.” If I could, I would.
May 25, 2025
Totally agree we should go further overseas aid should be in British produced goods for example if you need a pump to move water make it in error UK and ship it out.
May 25, 2025
All good, sensible ideas ,especially the first 6
May 25, 2025
yes and start trading mire with the EU
Reply Glad you have come to see trading with the EU is a mire
May 25, 2025
Sir John, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you may not have noticed the Labour Party have been in charge of such policies as you list them since July last year.
With that small detail in mind, I think you will find it difficult for your sensible ideas to increase domestic trade to be adopted.
Have you come across a chap called Ed Miliband at all?
May 25, 2025
Import substitution requires a lowering of the cost of producing British goods. A couple of weeks ago I went out to see if I could get another kettle. The entire offering from a major electrical store were made in China. It seems it’s impossible for UK companies to compete on price. Turning this round means a major reduction in UK costs – cost of energy, taxation and housing.
So it’s government policy to wipe out British manufacturing wherever possible.
May 25, 2025
@Dave Andrews. I invested in an AIM-listed company that is the global leader in kettle controls (its ticker is KETL), exporting 2bn units worldwide. They’ve shifted some of their manufacturing to China, so some of those Chinese kettles may well have had British designed components in them, and a tiny portion of the profit would revert to the UK. Mind you, the share price has lost nearly 70% in the past 3 years!
May 25, 2025
@DA; Yes the UK consumer knows the value of everything but the worth of nothing, whilst the UK politics is obsessed with their cross-party support of a 2% inflation figure. Not that I disagree with your basic point, it’s just that the damage was done 45 years and the notion of WTO free trade ingrained. Stop the world, I want to get off!
May 25, 2025
One minute you don’t want the UK to be inward looking and champion free trade, the next you moan you can’t buy a UK made kettle Jerry.
If we get more protectionist then so will other nations we trade with.
May 25, 2025
@MiB;’ I never mentioned UK kettles!
“If we get more protectionist then so will other nations we trade with.”
Except manufacturing something in the UK is not “protectionist”, though placing barriers to the import of non UK made products is, were did I suggest I wanted to block non UK products?
The point I was making was whether the UK consumer would consider buying the more expensive UK product now, unlike back in the 1970s, after all they have got used to cheap imports that allow a better standard of living; as I’m sure you remember Martin, back in the late 1970s many consumer grade white and brown goods, even though well established, were considered non essential luxury items – heck many still boiled their kettles on the stove.
May 25, 2025
It seems I’ve not explained myself very well.
Jerry are you for free trade or for protectionist tariffs to protect UK manufacturers against foreign competion.
I admit I am unsure what the correct answer is but I would be interested to hear your views.
May 26, 2025
@MiB; Try actually reading the comment you replied to, you appear to have skipped past my second sentence! Otherwise please help me by explaining exactly what you do not understand when I said “were did I suggest I wanted to block non UK products”?…
May 26, 2025
I just politely asked you to explain what you meant Jerry.
And all I get is a passive aggressive reply.
Never mind.
May 26, 2025
MiB; “And all I get is a passive aggressive reply.”
Good grief… I had already explained, TWICE, once in the original reply to Dave and then an expanded explanation for you, yet you then ask a question that I had covered in that second reply, thus all you did was prove you had not bothered to read my comment(s), and now you wonder why I get agitated! 🙄
May 26, 2025
Just a thought for you Jerry
Please don’t go into teaching.
Someone (not as brilliant as you) asks a polite question and thrn gets shouted at.
May 25, 2025
So, Exporting is going to be impossible then because we WILL run out of energy making any available very expensive, but can we grow our own internal market?
Unlikely because HMG is intent on closing down farms and industries – then according to the net0 plan; airports will close and shipping will be severely limited.
Starmer must feel like he is on a roll having gotten away already with so many acts of abuse against the British people. Expect him to continue with his destruction, because he certainly is not going to stop because a few people wrote to their MPs.
May 25, 2025
Sir John
As always good logical and much needed, the sort of things a Government and Parliament would be doing if it was to wanting to create a future for the UK, its people…
Not out of the woods on external trade, the UK Government and its Parliament has set out to renege on the spirit and the intention of the deal with the USA. After signing a UK USA deal the UK Government and Parliament set out to wreck it, all the food related reciprocal arrangements have been shelved, they have put the EU in charge of UK food productions and put the EU courts in control of administering the toeing of the EU line by the UK. That could in the same vein mean the UK will now be subject to the US/EU tariffs.
I am sure Trump will be pleased to know that Two Tier K lied to him…
May 25, 2025
In addition to import substitution, the UK is capable of exporting more because it contains people developing solutions to complex global problems eg Kraken (https://kraken.tech), Matnex (https://www.matnex.ai) etc – there are plenty of such companies which are able to generate high margins because they are solving a complex problem and can therefore cope with tariffs. Import substitution and exporting is where people need to focus their attention whilst we sit out the next four years!
May 25, 2025
I believe we also should review our manufacturing standards and deregulate. I believe manufacturing standards have dropped materially since 2000 such as plastics, metals and ceramics have often thinned; gold and silver quality has dropped and too often manufacturing product is not built to last (and be repairable) but to be thrown away.
Regulations have contributed to this but I also think it is due to cheap, inferior imports from China. We should reinstate manufacturing standards and deregulate back to pre-2000 levels which will encourage domestic production and the jobs, incomes and GDP growth we were used to.
May 25, 2025
Remove any and all EU regulations on UK industries/companies that don’t export to the EU
May 25, 2025
Of course the other opinion is to (re)join one of those protective trading blocks (including access to Rare Earth minerals and the like) that now seem to cover 3/4 of the world, or we can become inward looking, isolated, not even having the explicit cooperation of Commonwealth countries after they were told to take a hike back in 1972.
Since Johnson tied the UK to the apron-strings of the EU via his Brexit WA, Sunak added a rope, and now Starmer has added a chain, quite frankly the die has been cast.
Had Johnson and his party had had the guts to have told the EU to take a hike, do their worst with the island of Ireland (neither we not the ROI were ever going to build a hard border) and thus the UK had left on WTO rules what our host says would make a lot of sense but that is not were we are.
May 25, 2025
Re our hosts Bullet points;
7 to 9 are unrealistic I suspect, at lest in the short term, due to past government decisions (such as Labour not securing the future for “MG Rover” twenty years ago), we likely simply do not have the manufacturing capacity here in the UK [1], even if “made in the UK” only means assembled in the UK.
10 would likely lead to the State having to take control of the electricity industry (again), the keys having been returned in effect, either voluntarily or by their banks, as investors walk away from high risk investments.
[1] unless of course customers were happy with the (alleged) Henry Ford style of edict; ‘the customer can have any colour, so long as it is black’; in other words zero options/choice
May 25, 2025
No need to tell anyone to take a hike. Why be so confrontative? Just be firm with WTO terms and invite FTA. Perhaps the government would surprise itself to find there are trade partners who are content with fair terms.
May 26, 2025
@DA; My “take a hike” comment wasn’t about WTO trade, it was directed towards the EU, given they tried to stymie Brexit via their threats to destabilize the island of Ireland with talk of a ‘hard boarder’. Quite frankly telling the EU (Commission) to take a hike would likely have been on the mild side of most peoples language, many would have used only two words, the second being “off”…
May 25, 2025
I remember your posts years ago Jerry, where you warned against leaving the EU without a deal.
Leaving on WTO terms would lead to disaster, used to be your line.
However I’m very glad you are now saying it would have been a good outcome.
May 25, 2025
@Sam; You clearly miss understood my comments back then, what I was warning about was the risk of leaving neither on WTO rules or accepting a BRINO exit (in effect on EEA/EFTA terms), unfortunately Johnson, who I seem to recall you and others worshiped as our savior, chose neither and hence the current mire.
May 26, 2025
I can’t remember me (or others on here) worshiping Boris Johnson as our saviour Jerry
One of you more inventive historical claims.
But it did make me chuckle.
May 26, 2025
@Sam; You do appear to have a very selective memory…
By the way, is this the short argument, or the full multi day waste of our hosts time (with apologizes to Monty Python)?! Whatever.
May 26, 2025
Whatever indeed Jerry
I note you’ve already posted lots of posts today Monday 26th, so your comment about wasting the host’s time is also rather funny.
May 25, 2025
All very good suggestions, Sir John. But they’re not going to happen. We have a PM who finds Davos preferable to Westminster and as an intrnational human rights lawyer believes in global equity and hence open door immigration and a lowering of UK living standards to match the rest of the world. We need to be punished for our previous deeds and broken both economically and socially. Hence not only should the Chagos Islands be given away but we should pay Mauritius as well. Unfortunately this ideology also runs through the Conservative Party as evidenced by PM Johnson running immigration on a truly massive scale and announcing to the World at the UN, “we were the first to send the great puffs of acrid smoke to the heavens on a scale to derange the natural order”. So we deserve the economic pain of the Net Zero Strategy and must become a country of strangers. We are to be the world’s whipping boy.
May 25, 2025
Whatever happened to the UK government & local government – ‘Buy UK’ first
May 25, 2025
What did you think, Sir John, of Hunt’s recollections in the Mail yesterday? Can he really be as ignorant as he makes out?
Reply Did not see them
May 26, 2025
@rose; Can we be sure what was printed on the (Daily) Mail was verbatim of what Mr Hunt wrote in his draft. Can we be assured that your appraisal of the article is without bias, given your previous support of Truss and dislike of Hunt?
May 26, 2025
I don’t dislike Hunt and never have.
May 25, 2025
When the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the ditch! That about sums up Starmer, Reeves and Rayner, who have not got a clue how to run a modern economy. For Rayner to say she wants more taxes is incredible; the ignorance is breathtaking! The thought that Rayner may replace Starmer at some future date is frightening!!!
All your suggestions are good common sense, but there is no chance of them being implemented.
While we are wedded to Net Zero, there is no chance of any growth in the UK economy. With Starmer giving away the Chagos Islands in an appalling deal, then giving away the UK to the EU in an equally appalling deal, we can only ask when he will give away Gibraltar and the Falklands?
Have we ever had a weaker, more pathetic Prime Minister?
May 25, 2025
Successful capitalists in the UK don’t want to get mixed up with fishing as too hard to make good money from: 1. High diesel costs for boats. 2. High wages. High energy costs for processing fish. 4. Trade barriers from Europe.
May 25, 2025
Sir John,
I watched an interesting interview with David Banks on G.B. news he had researched Kier Starmers E.U. deal, I believe the phase two will sign us up to realignment with the E.U. on many policies, most concerning was the defence project whereby control including Foreign Policy will be signed over to the E.U. as you are aware Kier Starmer has already signed us up to this dreadful Chagos deal does this mean the E.U. will have control over Gibraltar and the Falklands will they be the next to be signed away. I believe the the cost of the E.U. safer defence policy will be 150 euro loan followed by 800 Billion euro plus over seven years, if this information is correct can Parliament stop Starmer from signing this deal, as Starmer appears to sidetrack Democracy.
May 26, 2025
We should be using tariffs to equalise the imposed burden that our government puts on our manufacturers and producers.
Net zero costs borne by UK manufacturers but no by Chinese or EU producers plus H & S and maternity costs should be equalised through the tariff system.
Free trade should introduce competition but one party should not be operating with one hand behind their back.
May 30, 2025
Stop all solar panels and wind blowers being placed on farm land or open spaces. Use only on roof tops and in car parks. They are obliterating our wonderful countryside with this nonsense. Give farmers back their money which is being stopped. We need food production here not imported from other countries which is costly in transport costs. Lastly, get rid of this vile government which is taxing us out of existence and ruining our country.