The last days of globalisation

President Donald Trump has today announced sweeping tariffs on goods from countries across the world, on what he called "Liberation Day". He says the move will make America wealthy again. This, of course, brings all the trade “experts” crawling out of the woodwork to denounce Trump - particularly those of a pro-EU persuasion. This is perhaps a mortal blow the the liberal “international rules based order”.

This, I think, is a long overdue correction to a regime that bought into liberal globalisation dogma. America does not need trade to the extent that most countries do. It is large enough and diverse enough to provide for most of its needs. It has its own minerals, uranium, massive energy reserves, limitless agricultural potential and ample fishing grounds. America can go it alone if it so chooses.

For America, outsourcing manufacturing to China was a grave and costly mistake. Switching from tangible production to debt-fuelled services consumption has been a disaster for the American working class. Globalisation meant exporting jobs and importing a fentanyl epidemic. Something eloquently articulated by JD Vance just recently.

Donald Trump is finally attempting to rebalance the economy, and rebuild manufacturing in America. This is what he was elected to do. The writing has been on the wall since 2016. Even the Democrats recognised the necessity. Whoever occupies the White House, America is instinctively protectionist. There's a reason the Biden administration never unjammed the WTO.

Critics will say that nobody wins from tariffs, but what Trump is doing should not be viewed in isolation of what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE, and the wider abandonment of Net Zero energy policies. This stands a good chance of working. This is America’s Brexit from the old world order. Some say the idea might be right but the execution is sloppy, heavy handed and ill thought out. It could have been done with less pain and less reputational damage. But we should recall that with Trump, everything is a negotiation, and this round of tariffs is just the opening gambit. For Trump, tariffs are also foreign policy leverage.

The wider implications of this are huge. The Republic of Ireland is expected to be hit hard. Potential relocations of American industry back to the US will expose Ireland’s arbitrage economy, which underpins much of its welfare spending. Recession is almost certainly on the cards. That’s especially problematic a for a country that’s imported nearly a million low-skill migrants in the last few years. That suggests considerable welfare cuts, job shedding and major public disorder. It could see those same migrants making their way to Britain, further destabilising our own politics.

Britain, meanwhile, has got off comparatively lightly. Trump has only imposed 10% tariffs on the UK. It’s not exactly a vindication of Brexit, but it’s enough to make the Labour government think twice about closer ties with the EU. This upending of the liberal order has seriously wrong-footed the British political class. Labour, a neoliberal internationalist party, instinctively prefers to shackle us to the corpse of the EU, and now seeks to tie us into Europe's eco-protectionism (CBAM) and would rejoin the customs union if they thought they could get away with it.

As to how Europe will respond remains to be seen. Europe can hardly withstand a trade war having rapidly deindustrialised and closed down much of its energy infrastructure in favour of cheap Russian gas. Trump’s tariffs may force the EU to change their tune on the Ukraine war.

If the EU is true to form, though, they will pigheadedly double-down on liberal internationalism. The international rules based order is predicated on the idea that pursuit of the direct national interest is bad global citizenship. This is the overriding mentality of European elites. It is based on blind faith in “free trade” and "international law" above all other concerns. It is the total victory of neoliberalism over nationalism. The EU will fight tooth and nail to defend liberal internationalism because its very survival is contingent on suppressing national democracy and nationalist sentiment.

On that basis, the ideologues of the EU view Donald Trump as much a threat as Putin. He is a threat to their order. The EU would sooner pivot to Communist China than be influenced by America. Ultimately, EU technocracy has more in common with Communist China. Both regimes are contingent on containing democracy and controlling the narrative. Once you understand that the EU is a failing empire in its death throes, its every action and reaction becomes painfully transparent. From internet censorship to the destruction of the European auto industry, all is explained by the necessity to assert control over every aspect of human activity.

This is why the European liberal mind opposes DOGE. All of a sudden, Europe has lost its American partner in sustaining the liberal hegemony over the narrative. The ersatz civil society they depend on to reinforce the narrative internationally is collapsing, and the funding for their propaganda is evaporating, not least the bogus science behind climate change. The European bureaucracy now stands alone, unable to hold the line all by itself. Democracy is reasserting itself. This is why we see challenger candidates jailed and elections overturned. The beast is afraid.

This is also why Europe's elites are banging the drums of war. This is what failing regimes do to postpone their own oblivion. The people of Europe are gradually waking up to the fact that the real threat to their security, prosperity and liberty comes not from external aggressors, but from within their own establishments.

This puts Britain at a crossroads. We either choose more of the same, and align with failing European technocratic imperialism, or we seek our own path, emulating the USA in dismantling the unaccountable, wasteful and bureaucratic state, and rebuilding our ailing economy. Treading water is no longer an option. Britain is on a decline trajectory and very probably on the path to low grade civil war.

The liberal international order has been the prevailing ideology of my lifetime. I'm just old enough to remember what it was life before. I'm not one for misty-eyed nostalgia because I'm from Bradford and I'm perfectly well aware how grim it was in parts of the north, but for all the material wealth of "free trade" and liberal borders, we are not better off for it.

Britain, as it stands today, has no aircraft industry to speak of, and anyone under forty would stare at me blankly if I talked about Foden, AEC, Scammell, Morris, or Bristol. Jaguar is owned by Indians, Vauxhall is just a brand belonging to a global corporation, and anything electronic is now made in China.

Meanwhile, the local water board is owned by a Hong Kong hedge fund, and the local football team is owned by the Russian mafia, and everyone from the players down to the cleaners is African. Most of our towns are derelict. The working classes can't afford a house, and even middle income households struggle to afford a new car unless they fake a disability.

Most of our material needs are met, but with daily deliveries from Amazon, where we mostly buy disposable, cheap Chinese tat made with stolen IP. Even the clothes we wear are made in sweatshops on the other side of the planet. The North Sea fish we eat is caught by a crew of Filipinos, flown to far east for processing, then flown back. Meanwhile, our farmers can only stay in business if they have a second job.

Elsewhere, our cities are increasingly alien to us. Most of the big cities are predominantly occupied by foreigners, and you're more likely to see the flag of a Middle East terrorist group than a Union Jack. There are few places left we can call our own. If you get sick you have to stand in line behind foreigners to see a foreign doctor with a thick foreign accent, and you have to suck it up because they're "just as British as you". In your old age, all the care workers will be random Nigerians scamming the visa system.

Meanwhile, we concrete over the countryside with windmills, solar panels, and Barratt shitboxes for white-flight refugees in search of familiarity. Illegal immigrants have a better chance of obtaining social housing than our own people. Not that you'd want it now that it means having to live next door to the Taliban.

Then, as much as we're in a self-inflicted cost of living crisis, we are also in the middle of a deep-rooted spiritual crisis where men are killing themselves, mothers are aborting their children, and women can't get through the week without a cocktail of cheap wine and Prozac.

Gradually we are replaced by an endless stream of low-IQ third worlders, and are set to become a minority in our own country. All the while the regime gaslights us and tells us "diversity makes us stronger" as we watch our neighborhoods become demilitarised zones.

In about three decades, we've gone from being a cohesive, productive, safe country, with real communities, to being a miserable, dilapidated kleptocracy - where nobody makes anything, and the only way to become middle class is to join the army of white collar parasites who would otherwise be unemployed were it not for state theft.

Somehow we have the worst of all worlds. Unregulated corporates and a bloated, unproductive, unaccountable state where democracy means nothing and the police lock you up for complaining about it. This is Yookay PLC.

Some will blame Thatcher, others will blame Blair, others will blame the EU, but it's all part of the same prevailing post-nation neoliberal ideology. Britain is no longer a homeland. It is a derelict shithole with piles of garbage lining the streets, litter everywhere, with roads full of potholes and clogged up drains. We’re cooked.

What's required now is a total reboot. We no longer have the luxury of propping up twentieth century ideals. The climate change narrative is dying, Net Zero is collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity, and liberalism itself is sliding into the abyss. Whether the regime realises it or not, the ground is falling away beneath them.

For Britain it’s time to put our own people first and our national interest first. It is not in our interests to shackle ourselves to EU deindustrialisation policies, it is not in our interests to liberalise trade with India, and it is not in our interests to become a vassal of the USA in the hope that Trump might throw us a bone. We must rebuild our manufacturing, defence and agriculture. We must put strategic assets back into public ownership. We must put cheap, abundant energy first. If the rules get in the way then we must rip up the rule book.

What's needed is a grown-up assessment of priorities, recognising that "international rules-based order" was a temporary aberration, and is very very dead. If our political class cannot comprehend this, they will take us all down with them.

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This week I’ve been speaking with NatCon Australia about the state of British politics and the need for a new nationalism. Please have a watch…