UK could avoid the US tariffs the ‘atrocity’ EU is facing because Starmer has been ‘nice’, Trump suggests
Good morning. Keir Starmer will tonight become the first British PM since Brexit to attend a European Council meeting (a dinner, as part of an informal EU summit), and it could not have come at a more difficult time, because it is happening just as Donald Trump is unleashing tariff warfare.
Graeme Wearden is covering the global tariff story on his business live blog.
For the UK, a global tariff war presents a particular challenge. Pre-Brexit, the UK would just been a leading member of the EU camp. In 2016, Brexiters argued that Britain would be better off not aligned to any major trading bloc, and that it would gain most by being able to nimbly duck and weave through the global trading networks. Some Brexiters wanted a straightforward alignment with the US, which now seems to be the official Conservative party position, but most of them were arguing for pick ‘n’ mix unilateralism.
Starmer is about to find out whether this Brexit scenario turns out to be viable, whether, in a trade war between the US and the EU, Britain can avoid the US tariffs that Trump plans to impose on the EU while similtaneously achieving Labour’s goal of improving UK-EU trade by easing some of the trade barriers that have been in place since Brexit. Or whether the UK has to pick a side. Or whether it ends up being crushed in the middle, losing out in both directions.
In comments yesterday, Trump said that he was not ruling out tariffs on the UK, but he implied that he was trying to peel Britain away from the EU, whom he described as “an atrocity”. He was speaking to reporters at Andrews air force base near Washington, as he arrived back from Florida, and he was specifically asked about the UK by Nomia Iqbal, BBC’s North America correspondent. Here is a transcript of the key exchange.
Q: Mr President, which country will be next on tariffs? Would you consider taxing the UK?
DT: Well, we’re going to see what happens. It’ll happen
Q: With the UK?
DT: Might. Let’s see how things work out. It might happen with them.
It will definitely happen with the European Union, I can tell you that, because they’ve really taken advantage of us. We have over $300bn deficit. They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing, and we take everything from them – millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products.
So the UK is way out of line. And we’ll see.
[At this point Trump appears to correct himself, having said UK when he appears to have meant the EU.]
But European Union is really out of line. UK is out of line, but I’m sure that one, I think that one, can be worked out.
But the European Union it’s an atrocity what they’ve done.
Q: Prime Minister Starmer wants a closer relationship with the EU.
DT: Well, Prime Minister Starmer has been very nice. We’ve had a couple of meetings. We’ve had numerous phone calls. We’re getting along very well. We’ll see whether or not we can balance out our budget.
With the European Union, it’s $350bn deficit, so obviously something’s going to take place there
As is often the case with Trump, he managed to combine the language of a teenager (“very nice”, “getting along very well”) with the menace of a gangster.
At some point we will get some sort of response from Starmer, and from EU leaders, although – in public, at least – it may be very constrained and limited.
Jakub Krupa is covering the Europe-wide aspects of the summit on our Europe live blog
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, gives a speech on school standards.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensison secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Afternoon: Keir Starmer holds a meeting with the Nato secretary general at Nato HQ in Brussels. They are due to hold press conference at 3.40pm UK time.
3.30pm: The Home Builders Federation and the National Housing Federation give evidence to the Commons public accounts committee about the cladding scandal.
Evening: Starmer has dinner with EU leaders at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Polish PM Donald Tusk says he wants to have UK ‘as close as possible to EU when it comes to security issues’
Jakub Krupa
Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, and a former president of the European Council, has said that he wants to see the UK “as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues”. Poland currently holds the presidency of the EU and Tusk said it was his initiative to invite Keir Starmer to the dinner tonight.
This is what he said (in Polish) as he arrived this morning.
I am really keen that, regardless of Brexit and its consequences, to have the UK as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues, defence industry, and to find ways to eliminate or reduce barriers in trade between the UK and Europe.
Today is the moment to get as close as possible again.
Here are two UK lobby journalists on President Trump suggesting the UK may be exempt from sanctions.
Brexiters are always keen to highlight Brexit bonuses whenever they can find one (which isn’t often), and Harry Cole from the Sun thinks this is a good example.
Amazing how many people are managing to point out Trump says UK can escape EU tariffs without mentioning the B word this morning!
Hugo Gye from the i says this shows that Starmer’s policy of sucking up to Trump seems to be paying off.
EU leaders arriving for their informal summit have been relatively robust in what they have been saying about President Trump and the threat of tariffs, For example, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said:
If we are attacked in terms of trade, Europe – as a true power – will have to stand up for itself and therefore react.
Jakub Krupa has all the detail on his Europe live blog.
Keir Starmer’s dinner with EU leaders tonight will take place at the Palais d’Egmont, a 16th-century palace where Ted Heath signed the treaty taking Britain into the European Economic Community in 1972. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, claims this is a deliberate attempt to humiliate him.
The EU has invited @Keir_Starmer to a leaders summit in the very building where Ted Heath signed away our sovereignty in 1972.
This is deliberate and humiliating.
Starmer has learned nothing from the Brexit vote and it will come back to bite the Labour Party.
Phillipson says she is ‘deeply concerned’ about school absence rates
Q: School absences are still very high. How long will it take to turn that round?
Phillipson says she is “deeply concerned” about this. One child in five is not regulary in school. That damages their life chances, she says. She goes on:
That’s not something that we as government can tackle alone, although there’s a lot that we’re doing. It’s about that partnership between government schools and families. And after the pandemic, that increasing fracturing that we’ve seen – that’s why it’s been so important that we’ve reset that relationship between government and schools, and with the workforce, too.
In terms of what we’re doing at the moment, we’re investing more in mentoring and attendance support, working with schools that are not delivering what they should to drive up attendance rates.
Phillipson says it’s ‘insulting’ to suggest new Ofsted report cards too complicated for parents
Q: Is it impossible to have a report card system for schools with enough detail to keep the unions happy, but enough simplicity to make it clear to parents?
Phillipson replies:
I think the system should and can do both. I think parents are more than able to process more information than is the case currently provided.
I think it’s, frankly, deeply insulting to suggest that somehow parents either don’t want or can’t understand a wider range of areas that need further improvement, or where there is real strength within the school system.
What this will also allow us to do is to not just focus on areas where schools need to improve, and where we will put extra support behind that, but alongside that, recognising where there is fantastic work within the system.
Bridget Phillipson has finished her speech. She is now taking questions.
Q: [From the BBC] How will parents hold schools to account? Will you get rid of failing schools?
Phillipson says she wants parents to see “a new and relentless focus on the very best quality education in all of our schools”.
What parents will see from the new set of arrangements, from the report cards, and from what I am setting out today is much more information about what is working well within their child’s school and where there is further to go in driving improvement.
Catherine McKinnell, the schools minister, was doing the interview round this morning on behalf of No 10. She was put up to talk primarily about the proposed Ofsted report cards, but inevitably she ended up being asked about tariffs and President Trump. This is what she said on LBC when asked if the UK was going to choose the EU over the US as a preferred trading partner.
We have incredibly strong trading relationships with the European Union, but also with the United States. The European Union is obviously our largest trading partner. The United States, we have £300bn of trade with the United States. They’re our largest investor. We are the largest investor in the United States – £1.2tn a year invested in one another’s economies. I don’t think we should have to choose.
I think Keir Starmer has taken the right approach in building really strong relationships with our European neighbours and with the United States.
New Ofsted report card system will provide ‘rich, granular insight’, Bridget Phillipson says
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is giving her speech on school standards now at the Centre for Social Justice.
There is a live feed here.
According to extracts released in advance, she will defend the proposals for a new Ofsted system for assessing schools. She will say:
Our proposals will swap single headline grades for the rich, granular insight of school report cards.
Raising the bar on what we expect from schools, shining a light on all the areas that matter, each given their own grade.
Identifying excellence and rooting out performance that falls short of expectations, so that parents have clearer, better information about their local schools.
Keir Starmer wants his meeting with EU leaders to focus on security. According to Downing Street, when he meets EU leaders tonight, he will “set out his pitch for an ambitious UK-EU defence and security partnership with a number of steps to increase co-operation on shared threats, and go further on cross-border crime and illegal migration, while delivering growth and security at home”. Rowena Mason has more detail here.
In a statement issued overnight, Starmer said:
We need to see all allies stepping up – particularly in Europe.
President Trump has threatened more sanctions on Russia and it’s clear that’s got Putin rattled. We know that he’s worried about the state of the Russian economy.
I’m here to work with our European partners on keeping up the pressure, targeting the energy revenues and the companies supplying his missile factories to crush Putin’s war machine.
Because ultimately, alongside our military support, that is what will bring peace closer.
Given that Putin is not the only European leader “rattled” by what Trump is up to, this agenda may be overshadowed by the trade/tariffs story.
Ofsted’s new school report card worse than old system, say headteachers
Moves to overhaul the way schools are inspected in England have been criticised by headteachers and teaching unions as “demoralising” and worse than the system they are aiming to replace, Richard Adams and Peter Walker report.
The Times this morning has splashed on a story claiming that, at the EU dinner this evening, President Macron will tell Keir Starmer that his appearance at the summit means Brexit has failed.
The story is based on a quote from a “senior diplomat” arguing that Macron thinks Brexit was always doomed to fail anyway, but that the election of Donald Trump has made it even more unviable.
In their story, Bruno Waterfield and Matt Dathan report:
Senior diplomats have said France views Starmer as the “demandeur,” a supplicant who is being pushed back into the EU fold because Britain has been weakened by Brexit at a time of growing international instability and the return of Trump to the White House.
A senior diplomat said: “The Brexit project, breaking away from the EU to create a global Britain, didn’t work. We thought it wouldn’t work because the UK is European, geographically and economically. Brexit was a project for a stable and prosperous world, but in a complicated world, obviously the UK will be closer to Europe.”
UK could avoid the US tariffs the ‘atrocity’ EU is facing because Starmer has been ‘nice’, Trump suggests
Good morning. Keir Starmer will tonight become the first British PM since Brexit to attend a European Council meeting (a dinner, as part of an informal EU summit), and it could not have come at a more difficult time, because it is happening just as Donald Trump is unleashing tariff warfare.
Graeme Wearden is covering the global tariff story on his business live blog.
For the UK, a global tariff war presents a particular challenge. Pre-Brexit, the UK would just been a leading member of the EU camp. In 2016, Brexiters argued that Britain would be better off not aligned to any major trading bloc, and that it would gain most by being able to nimbly duck and weave through the global trading networks. Some Brexiters wanted a straightforward alignment with the US, which now seems to be the official Conservative party position, but most of them were arguing for pick ‘n’ mix unilateralism.
Starmer is about to find out whether this Brexit scenario turns out to be viable, whether, in a trade war between the US and the EU, Britain can avoid the US tariffs that Trump plans to impose on the EU while similtaneously achieving Labour’s goal of improving UK-EU trade by easing some of the trade barriers that have been in place since Brexit. Or whether the UK has to pick a side. Or whether it ends up being crushed in the middle, losing out in both directions.
In comments yesterday, Trump said that he was not ruling out tariffs on the UK, but he implied that he was trying to peel Britain away from the EU, whom he described as “an atrocity”. He was speaking to reporters at Andrews air force base near Washington, as he arrived back from Florida, and he was specifically asked about the UK by Nomia Iqbal, BBC’s North America correspondent. Here is a transcript of the key exchange.
Q: Mr President, which country will be next on tariffs? Would you consider taxing the UK?
DT: Well, we’re going to see what happens. It’ll happen
Q: With the UK?
DT: Might. Let’s see how things work out. It might happen with them.
It will definitely happen with the European Union, I can tell you that, because they’ve really taken advantage of us. We have over $300bn deficit. They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing, and we take everything from them – millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products.
So the UK is way out of line. And we’ll see.
[At this point Trump appears to correct himself, having said UK when he appears to have meant the EU.]
But European Union is really out of line. UK is out of line, but I’m sure that one, I think that one, can be worked out.
But the European Union it’s an atrocity what they’ve done.
Q: Prime Minister Starmer wants a closer relationship with the EU.
DT: Well, Prime Minister Starmer has been very nice. We’ve had a couple of meetings. We’ve had numerous phone calls. We’re getting along very well. We’ll see whether or not we can balance out our budget.
With the European Union, it’s $350bn deficit, so obviously something’s going to take place there
As is often the case with Trump, he managed to combine the language of a teenager (“very nice”, “getting along very well”) with the menace of a gangster.
At some point we will get some sort of response from Starmer, and from EU leaders, although – in public, at least – it may be very constrained and limited.
Jakub Krupa is covering the Europe-wide aspects of the summit on our Europe live blog
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, gives a speech on school standards.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensison secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Afternoon: Keir Starmer holds a meeting with the Nato secretary general at Nato HQ in Brussels. They are due to hold press conference at 3.40pm UK time.
3.30pm: The Home Builders Federation and the National Housing Federation give evidence to the Commons public accounts committee about the cladding scandal.
Evening: Starmer has dinner with EU leaders at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
