Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 5

Britain hasn’t agreed a trade deal with the US – it’s ended a hostage negotiation | Gaby Hinsliff

There will be relief for carmakers but not much else to celebrate: Trump’s whims still hang over the UK – and the world – economy

Hang out the bunting and let the church bells ring. A VE Day trade deal with Donald Trump is done, and in the car plants of the West Midlands as much as in the backrooms of No 10, there will be understandable relief that, for now at least, America’s phoney war on them is over.

It’s true that the easing of arbitrary tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium that didn’t even exist until eight weeks ago falls far short of being an actual trade deal, not least because the president could rip it up again tomorrow if he felt like it. But the terms agreed between London and Washington could save thousands of jobs, which isn’t to be sniffed at, even if they’re jobs that need never have been at risk in the first place had Trump not suddenly chosen to threaten them. More surprisingly, Rachel Reeves seems to have managed to hang on to her digital services tax on (mostly US) tech companies, while for all the president’s bluster about “dramatic” new access for cattle ranchers to British markets it could have been infinitely worse for British farming: no chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-injected beef or flooding of the market with heavily subsidised US meat at prices British farmers just couldn’t afford to match.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Rage against the mainstream: did UK politics just change for good? – Politics Weekly UK

As Reform UK reaches new highs in the polls, it feels more and more likely that Nigel Farage’s triumph at local elections will be remembered as a huge turning point in UK politics. With support for the Tories at historic lows, and Keir Starmer’s government in deep trouble, is there a way back for the mainstream parties?

John Harris is joined by the Guardian columnists Gaby Hinsliff and Polly Toynbee to make sense of what could be the biggest political change to hit the UK in living memory

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Support for Reform has surged – what does this mean for UK politics? Our panel responds | Gaby Hinsliff, John McTernan, Carys Ofoko, Caroline Lucas, Meral Hussein-Ece, Henry Hill and Peter Kellner

Can Farage’s party now claim to be the official opposition? And what lessons should Labour and the Tories learn after a chastening night?

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Support for Reform has surged – what does this mean for UK politics? Our panel responds | Gaby Hinsliff, John McTernan, Carys Ofoko, Caroline Lucas and Peter Kellner

Can Farage’s party now claim to be the official opposition? And what lessons should Labour and the Tories learn after a chastening night?

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Even gen Z are resorting to cash – and I'm clinging to my own handful of it | Gaby Hinsliff

Power outages, the needs of vulnerable people and a general descent into dystopia are all reasons to resist banks’ dream of a cashless society

Opening my wallet, I’m down to my last five dollars. Dog-eared leftovers from a foreign holiday that I keep forgetting to take to the bank, they have somehow ended up being the only physical money I always carry, now there are so few places to use the British folding stuff.

Our village pub was for years a cash-only enterprise, possibly as a means of deterring customers from outside the village (long, gloriously eccentric story), and I keep a few pound coins rattling around the car for shopping trolleys. But using actual money feels mildly eccentric in most places now, or even faintly shady: increasingly cafes and bars are adopting “no cash” rules upfront to save the hassle of carting their takings to some faraway bank branch. Half of us have recently been somewhere that either didn’t accept cash or positively discouraged it, according to a survey by the ATM network Link. But since most people long ago switched to tapping a card reader, what’s the problem?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Why is Labour getting bolder on Europe? It knows even leave voters can now see the benefits | Gaby Hinsliff

With Labour losing votes to pro-European parties, an intriguing new deep-dive makes clear that the public mood has shifted

It’s nearly nine years now since Britain lost its collective mind.

More than enough time, then, to put the Brexit referendum into perspective. Leavers have moved on to the point where only 11% of British voters still kid themselves that it’s turned out brilliantly. It’s remain politicians who had started to look strangely stuck in the past, still frightened of sounding too pro-European in case they somehow woke the monster. But joyfully – now there’s a word I haven’t typed much lately – it looks like something is finally shifting.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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We obsess over the angry young men going Reform. But what of the anxious young women going Green? | Gaby Hinsliff

Desire for a politics that cares about global and local injustice is sharpening the political gender divide

Sometimes a political backlash doesn’t take the shape you expect. Though there are times when it goes off like a firework, as young men’s TikTok-fuelled surge of enthusiasm for Nigel Farage did last summer, sometimes it’s more of a long, slow burn. The most underexplored form of revolt against mainstream politics right now is the second kind, involving not angry young men lurching rightwards but anxious young women turning, if anything, more sharply left.

Almost a quarter of women aged 18 to 24 voted Green last July, roughly double the number of young men who voted Reform, though predictably it’s the latter who have since got all the attention. While the big parties chased avidly after so-called Waitrose women, well-heeled home counties matrons considering defecting from the Tories, they had little to say to their daughters. So it was the Greens who ended up cornering the market in a certain kind of frustrated gen Z voter: typically a middle-class student or graduate in her early 20s, whose conscience is pricked every time she opens Instagram by heartrending images of orphans in Gaza or refugees drowning in the Channel, and who can’t understand why nobody seems to care. She’s angry about the rampant misogyny of some boys she knew at school, Donald Trump, greedy landlords and a burning planet, and the Greens’ more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger social media posts attacking Keir Starmer for choosing welfare cuts over wealth taxes strike a chord.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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If Britain is now resetting the clock on trans rights, where will that leave us? | Gaby Hinsliff

There is both joy and dismay after the supreme court judgment. Compassion and leadership are really needed now

So this is how a clock turns backwards. With the hands still spinning even now, it’s hard to know yet exactly how far back in time we will land. But Wednesday’s supreme court ruling that for the purposes of equality law, “woman” means “biological woman” – basically the chromosomes you were born with, regardless of what legal hoops you have since jumped through – is nonetheless a watershed moment.

We are going back to a time before “trans women are women”, full stop, no debate: and if it’s handled well, accepting that sometimes life genuinely is more complicated than that could ultimately be healthy. But if handled badly, we could be heading back to a far darker time, when trans existence was shrouded in fear and shame and bigots had carte blanche.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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The Next Day by Melinda French Gates review – Melinda on life, before and after Bill

The philanthropist offers sensible advice about moving on and ditching perfectionism, but you get the impression she is struggling to take it herself

Melinda French Gates is a woman who seemingly leaves little to chance. From girlhood she would write down goals for herself to reach, and she was just as driven at college and in her early career at Microsoft, where she famously met and married its billionaire co-founder Bill Gates. The couple divorced in 2021.

There is a small, sad moment in her memoir The Next Day where she writes of happily gaining weight in pregnancy because it was the first time she’d felt so free “from perfectionism … the crushing relentless societal pressure to look a certain way”. Only well into middle age, when a friend gently questions her constant self-improvement projects, does she wonder whether in her conscientiousness she had “missed opportunities to embrace spontaneity, lean into the unexpected”.

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To understand this government, look at who it bailed out – and the flailing UK sector it didn’t | Gaby Hinsliff

Universities, a key plank of our economy, face a bonfire of jobs. But are they the jobs Starmer wants to be seen to be saving?

It’s hard to get romantic about the death of office jobs.

Nobody waxes lyrical about the glory days of working in payroll, and Bruce Springsteen doesn’t fill stadiums with soaring anthems about middle management headcount. But whether the recipient’s collar is white or blue, getting made redundant is getting made redundant, and it hurts.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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