TRADE wars, tariffs and rising prices provide the worst possible climate for Labour’s vacuous reliance on private-sector-led “growth” to rescue the economy.

The direction of travel was clear before — not only through US sanctions on China, but through Washington’s wider industrial and sanctions policy designed to relocate industry from Europe to its own shores under Joe Biden. But Donald Trump has now decisively signalled war on “globalisation.” 

Labour has no idea what to do about it. Yvette Cooper admits it will be damaging for trade and growth internationally but has no suggestions.

Other Establishment parties urge that we pick sides. The Tories want Keir Starmer to cancel his trip to Brussels, aimed at improving ties with the European Union, and go to Washington instead. 

To do what isn’t specified: presumably to plead that Britain is spared punitive tariffs itself in return for an even more slavish obedience to US diktats. Probably ones which damage our economy in other ways, such as restricting trade with China.

The Lib Dems and Scottish National Party recommend the opposite. We should rejoin the customs union with the EU, they urge, though its largest economy Germany is mired in recession, its industries trail the US and China technologically and both Paris and Berlin are paralysed by crises of political legitimacy.

The EU is no more ready for a trade war with the US than Britain is. Its instincts, like those of our ruling class, are to sacrifice its peoples’ interests for a place, however humble, at Trump’s table. 

Following his re-election European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen suggested Europe could increase purchases of fracked US shale gas in return for being spared sanctions, ignoring both the environmental consequences and the ongoing impact of high energy prices on industry, agriculture and household budgets. 

To Trump’s threat to withdraw support from Ukraine, European leaders race to promise higher military spending and a readiness to take the cost of sustaining the war onto their own countries. All this will only deepen the economic and social crisis driving support for the far right.

It is the far right who currently stand to gain if Labour fail to raise living standards and improve public services. Its chances of doing either retreat with each new concession to corporate power. 

The more elusive growth looks, the more Labour veers away from investment in fixing the public sector or raising wages, blundering after transient corporate favours like a lost traveller chasing a will o’the wisp deeper into the swamp. 

Now we hear the Treasury wants “serious tooth removal” to make the already diluted employment rights Bill even more, well, toothless. 

Growth, say the “business leaders” who have failed to deliver it for years, cannot be threatened by workplace rights. A bleaker outlook for international trade may become yet another reason for Labour to break its promises.

Giving our ever more parasitical capitalist class everything it asks for will accelerate the race to the bottom on environmental and labour standards. 

Giving Trump everything he asks for will entangle us in trade and potentially actual wars, and entrench British complicity in projects like the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

We should stand up to both. Demand an independent foreign policy that rejects Trump’s bid to divide the world into hostile camps.

Strengthen the employment rights Bill and confirm the rollout of collective bargaining to lift wages, and raise taxes on corporate profits and the rich to fund better public services.

The fat cats will wail that all this threatens “growth.” But the runaway growth in their profits since the pandemic has done nothing for workers. Labour will be judged on whether people’s lives get easier or harder in the next few years. 

The government must override the Treasury’s craven concern to appease the richest if it is to answer that question positively.