‘National interest’ is not the answer to Trump’s tariffs

Trump’s trade war has sent shockwaves through global capitalism

Donald Trump’s trade war has sent shockwaves through global capitalism—and politicians and bosses want working class people to pay the price.

He imposed wide-ranging tariffs—taxes on imports into the United States—on countries across the world last week.

French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz slammed them as “brutal and unfounded” and “fundamentally wrong”.

China faces tariffs of 34 percent and the European Union (EU) of 20 percent, while Britain has the ­relatively lower level of 10 percent.

Trump claims that Keir Starmer is “very happy” with the tariff ­agreement, but foreign secretary David Lammy has come out against them.

He has promised to keep “national interests” at the heart of any negotiations with the US. He claims his primary worries are for the “British people who will be very concerned at this time about how this affects their bottom line”.

But where was Lammy’s concern when the Labour Party stole money from the pockets of disabled people? Where was his concern for the “bottom line” of working class people when Labour refused to scrap the two-child benefit cap?

Trump has started the trade war as part of his “America First” agenda and claims that tariffs will help “return” manufacturing jobs to the US.

The Western leader’s opposition to Trump is based on support for free market policies that have failed ­millions of working class people around the world.

And their response is based on stoking nationalism—partly in the hope of deflecting anger against them.

Doug Ford, a conservative Canadian politician, won his third ­premiership of the province of Ontario last month. He campaigned on a platform against the tariffs, maintaining that Canada is “not for sale”.

He has accused Trump of ­stabbing Canada in the back and transformed himself into the “Canada First” candidate.

The danger is that the left and trade unions line up behind their “own” governments in the trade war.

In Britain, this was the response of Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham.

One of Unite’s demands on Labour is a “commitment to buy British goods wherever possible, including purchasing new UK built Typhoon jets and not American made F-35s”.

It’s a strategy based on lining up behind British bosses to “protect jobs” by making firms more “competitive”. Bosses will use that call to squeeze more out of workers and blackmail them into taking worse pay, terms and conditions.

There is no such thing as a “national interest” between the super-rich and the rest of us.

Politicians push the idea to paper over class divisions and make working class people think that ­“foreigners” are their real enemy.

In fact, workers in Britain have more in common with workers in the US or China than with their own bosses and politicians.

The turmoil in the stock ­markets may seem like a million miles away from the lives of working class people.

But bosses have invested people’s pensions into the stock market, for example. And when there is a crisis at the top, bosses and bankers try to protect their profits by squeezing working class people more.

Free trade versus protectionism is a false choice for the left and ­working class people. They are different ways for the bosses to compete with one another and maximise profits on the backs of workers.

The real alternative is a ­socialist economy that is ­democratically planned and puts people before profit.

Winning that requires fighting the bosses and their profit-system, not lining up behind a fake “national interest”.