by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Guardian
We should all be worried that the rightwing organisation Alliance Defending Freedom has been increasing its activities in this country
I couldn’t sleep the other night, because I made the fatal mistake of reading about US politics directly before bed, specifically the executive order
of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian museums. If US politics were a film, I’d say we’re somewhere in between having read aloud from the book that summons demons as a joke, and the final bloodbath.
If JD Vance rewriting history isn’t sinister enough, then came the news that the US state department will be “
” a UK woman’s abortion buffer zone case (why does everything they say always sound so creepy?) They are “concerned”, apparently, “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom”. The case is that of Livia Tossici-Bolt – who held up a sign reading “Here to talk if you want” outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic and
of breaching the buffer zone. Her case
by the UK branch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a rightwing organisation with
, which has
and activities in this country of late. It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Guardian
Funding schools to set up nurseries works. Why spend more on older children, when we know spending earlier is most effective?
Despite the rampaging rogue state across the Atlantic, around the cabinet table ministers push on with their plans. Too often ignored in all this sound and fury, there is some good news. This week Bridget Phillipson
the first 300 primary schools funding to set up nurseries that will add up to 4,000 places by the end of September. In the great dash for growth, growth, growth the OBR
an extra 0.2% of GDP due to the provision of free nursery hours for under twos, which are now coming on stream.
Nurseries may lack the glamour of mighty infrastructure projects, but the growth effect is immediate, letting more parents work, or work more hours. But the overriding motive of Labour’s early years push is to drive life chances of children whose future is too often determined long before they reach primary school.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Guardian
Labour peer Margaret Hodge shares how the party tackled the rise of the British National party in Barking before the 2010 general election
Once again, the far right is advancing across Europe, emboldened by the outcome of the 2024 presidential election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House. To turn back extremism masquerading as populism, I believe there are lessons we can learn from our battle against the extreme right in Barking in 2010, when
.
The context is different. There was little social media before 2010; we hadn’t been through a pandemic; there was no major war in Europe and no serious challenge to a rules-based international order.
by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Guardian
The island of Ireland faces a complex challenge with Trump’s tariffs. But giving up on transatlantic relations is not the answer
Ireland believes in open, free trade and has build a strong, resilient economy by being the most globalised in Europe. We are a trading country. That is why last night’s news on tariffs came as such a disappointment to us.
Imposing tariffs to force companies to locate in the US will fundamentally change how the world sees it. US economic dominance has not been built on scale or purchasing power alone, but on relationships and alliances, something it is now damaging. “Liberation day” risks forcing a realignment of how global trade operates, without the US at its centre, as countries rethink their relationship with the US and seek new, more reliable partners.
Simon Coveney is a former deputy prime minister, foreign minister and enterprise and trade minister of Ireland
by | Apr 4, 2025 | The Guardian
The UK is among those least hit by the US president’s war on the world economy. Retaliation at this point makes no sense
The tirade was astonishing. On Wednesday afternoon the world watched as the leader of its most powerful nation accused friends and foes alike of having “looted, pillaged, raped, plundered”, and simultaneously waved a bogus list of tariff imbalances. The playground paranoia was cringeworthy. What on earth was going on?
The answer can only be that Donald Trump is America’s elected president for the next four years. He says he
the military conflicts the US has fought or sponsored round the globe for a quarter of a century. We are waiting for that. Meanwhile, he is waging an economic war on world trade, a response that his biographer and ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz,
: “a life spent feeling like a victim … any time he does not totally dominate he feels ripped off”.
by | Apr 3, 2025 | The Guardian
With populist leaders on the back foot and EU support at its highest in years, the US trade war could be an opportunity for the union
Donald Trump has unleashed a trade war on the world, and Europe, considered by Washington to be among the “
”, is a major target. After hitting European steel, aluminium and cars, this week Trump announced sweeping 20% tariffs on almost all EU imports. Europeans have seen this coming for a long time. Well before his re-election, officials in Brussels were drawing up plans on how the EU might respond to Trump 2.0 and a possible transatlantic trade war.
What might the political fallout in Europe be? The good news is that Trump’s trade war puts Trump-friendly far-right forces in Europe in a terribly uncomfortable position. It’s one thing for the European far right to support Trump in principle, or to support the administration’s tyranny over peoples it doesn’t care about, be it Ukrainians, Canadians, Mexicans or Palestinians. It’s quite another to defend Trump and his policies when the victims are countries that these far-right parties supposedly represent.
Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
by | Apr 3, 2025 | The Guardian
The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created
For the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.
Donald Trump’s decision to impose
on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “
”
by | Apr 3, 2025 | The Guardian
Readers react to Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on goods imported into the US from
Martin Kettle considers it uncertain whether Donald Trump’s tariffs will work, while noting that even Keynes supported their occasional use (
). Such an open-minded view risks overoptimism. Keynes’s support for the idea of tariffs was limited to specific short-term need, as in protection of fledgling industry. But Keynes knew well the harm of tariffs as long-term economic policy.
Far from being uncertain, it is inevitable that Trump’s tariffs will fail. The deep interconnectedness of international supply chains means Americans will see a swift rise in inflation (that key growth-killer Trump campaigned to reduce) as indispensable worldwide component imports push up the price of domestic US goods and the reverse is repeated around the world.
by | Apr 3, 2025 | The Guardian
