Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 6

Britain can retaliate or negotiate with Trump – but there is no way we can win at this game | Gaby Hinsliff

Starmer will try to calm the situation and focus on May’s local elections, but one thing is clear: our ties with Europe are more crucial than ever

Nobody wins a trade war. You can lose it by greater or lesser degrees: you may be one of the luckier casualties. But that’s about as good as it gets. So, while there will have been initial relief in Downing Street on Wednesday night, a feeling even that Keir Starmer’s placating of Donald Trump looks vindicated, what followed was no victory lap.

How could it be, after that grotesquely swaggering show trial the president staged in the White House garden, all the better to jazz up an economic assault on what were once his country’s allies? Come on down, Britain, escaping with just the minimum 10% tariff on its exports to the US and no drive-by insults! Better than Taiwan (32% plus a lecture about how the US used to build all the semiconductors once), Vietnam (“They like me, I like them” but still a brutal 46%), the EU (“very very tough traders” and lucky to get away with 20%) or poor Lesotho, still reeling from the overnight collapse of US aid and now whacked by a 50% tariff. But even lucky Britain still emerged with a 25% duty on cars that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates could cost 25,000 jobs, plus the grim realisation that this may be just the beginning of a long unravelling. Globalisation is dead, protectionism is back, and all to satisfy one man’s delusions that life was better in the 1800s before income tax was invented.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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And the award for zero self-awareness goes to second-home owners raging about higher taxes | Gaby Hinsliff

Why the anger? Doubling council tax on holiday homes in England is a sensible, revenue-raising policy for communities in serious need

Should you have the world’s tiniest violin to hand, prepare to play it. This week, English councils gain the power to double council tax on second homes, and the holiday-cottage-owning classes are fuming. “Nothing but a racket,” thundered the Daily Telegraph, dismissing a supposedly “vindictive” raid on weekenders that was (gasp) “socialist” to boot.

Its Sunday sister paper further tugged on readers’ heartstrings with tales of homeowners who had inherited a second place somewhere lovely from their parents, and bridled at being asked to pay a few thousand pounds more a year to keep it in the family. In the Times, a retired barrister who felt forced to give up the seaside pad she had bought in her mother’s native St Davids complained of the tax “destroying generations of community-building”, as though houses sitting empty all winter were the one thing really guaranteed to bring a thriving community together. To which one can only say: people, learn to read a room(s). You’ve certainly got enough of them.

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Rachel Reeves swears this is not a return to austerity. What matters is that it feels like one | Gaby Hinsliff

The ‘party of change’ says it’s bound by fiscal rules. What voters hear is that all governments are the same, and things will never get better

It was change that won it. That was the single word to which Labour eventually boiled down all its complex ambitions; the six-letter slogan plastered triumphantly across its manifesto, because by the summer of 2024 change was pretty much the only thing the people of an exhausted country could all agree on. What kind of change exactly had by that point almost ceased to matter. Anything but this, millions of us told ourselves, as we scattered our votes in all directions.

It was clear even at the time that there were tensions between that urgent, almost reckless hunger for change and the naturally careful, cautious instincts of a steady-as-you-go incoming prime minister and chancellor. But Labour papered over them with the impenetrable mantra that, actually, if you think about it, “stability is change”. Well, actually, it isn’t. That line was never going to hold, and with Wednesday’s spring statement it finally broke.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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UK politics: ‘Nothing off the table’ over potential UK troop deployment for Ukraine, says No 10 – as it happened

PM’s spokesman says more meetings will take place in London next week to ‘accelerate’ planning to enforce any future peace deal

Elections will take place in 23 councils across England on 1 May 2025.

Six mayors will also be elected on 1 May in the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, North Tyneside, Doncaster and – for the first time – in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.

Contests for seats in 14 county councils will take place in Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Council elections are also taking place in the Isles of Scilly.

There will be eight contests for seats in unitary authorities, including Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire, as well as one metropolitan district in Doncaster.

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Labour ‘absolutely up for the fight’ over net zero, Ed Miliband says – UK politics live

Energy secretary accuses Conservatives and Reform of ‘total desertion and betrayal’ of future generations by failing to tackle climate crisis

Elections will take place in 23 councils across England on 1 May 2025.

Six mayors will also be elected on 1 May in the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, North Tyneside, Doncaster and – for the first time – in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.

Contests for seats in 14 county councils will take place in Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Council elections are also taking place in the Isles of Scilly.

There will be eight contests for seats in unitary authorities, including Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire, as well as one metropolitan district in Doncaster.

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Keir Starmer praised Adolescence. Now he needs to show he’s learned from it | Gaby Hinsliff

The government balked at protecting children from the perils of social media. TV has made the issues plain; now politics must do its job

It’s the story every parent of teenagers I know has been watching horrified through their fingers. The Netflix drama Adolescence starts with armed police breaking down an ordinary front door to arrest a 13-year-old boy for murder, in front of his bewildered parents. Though initially it seems there must have been some terrible mistake, Jamie’s Instagram account soon yields clues that all the adults – police, parents and teachers alike – had initially blundered past, oblivious.

Though talk of misogynistic “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate hovers over the storyline, this isn’t really a story of radicalisation. What it skewers is the feeling of growing up very publicly in a world where sending nudes risks them instantly being shared round the class and everyone automatically films playground fights on their phones, and how that intensifies dangerous feelings of shame and rejection in immature minds. Over half of young women now say they’re frightened of their male peers, according to a sad little survey for the Lost Boys project at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank. What’s not always obvious is that beneath their anger, boys are often equally frightened of them.

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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Call it a defence levy or even a patriot tax – but Labour is going to have to raise taxes, fast | Gaby Hinsliff

The world has shifted and defence spending has to rise. But time is running out for the government to make a case for it

Five years ago this weekend, life as we knew it was suspended overnight. Though with hindsight it seems amazing that it took Britain so long to lock down in the face of a gathering pandemic, at the time the pace of events felt dizzyingly fast.

It took a still-young government time to realise its manifesto was toast; that it would be forced into decisions either it or the public hated, which would nonetheless beat the alternative. The new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was visibly reluctant to rip up a budget whose ink was barely dry and instead spend billions paying people not to go to work. Yet ironically, it is furlough for which history may remember him most kindly.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him | Gaby Hinsliff

Trump has met a force he cannot control: people’s ability to parade their anger and distaste through consumer choice

What do you buy the richest man in the world? The answer, obviously, is the one thing that usually can’t be had for love nor money, and that’s pimping out the presidential office for advertising purposes.

Posing with Elon Musk beside a scarlet Tesla parked on the White House driveway, Donald Trump announced that he was buying one of his friend’s cars despite not being allowed to drive for security reasons because: “I just want people to know that you can’t be penalised for being a patriot.” The billionaire currently chainsawing his way through so many ordinary federal workers’ jobs had, he said indignantly, been unfairly treated by people who inexplicably now seem to have turned against his cars.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Labour loses its way on benefits reform – Politics Weekly UK

After months of speculation, the government will soon lay out plans to change the benefits system. Keir Starmer argues that the current system is ‘the worst of all worlds’. But with deep cuts to disability payments on the table, could the changes come at the expense of the most vulnerable? And will Labour MPs really be able to support this? John Harris hears from the head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation, Tom Pollard, and the Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff

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‘Nigel Farage feels real’: why young British men are drawn to Reform

Once, anti-establishment youth disillusioned with mainstream politics headed left. Now increasing numbers are tilting right. Why?

Josh is 24 years old and works as a carer. It’s not easy work, but he prefers it to his old job in a supermarket: most of his clients are elderly and “just want someone there with them, because they’re lonely”. In his spare time Josh used to be into boxing. But lately he’s got into politics instead.

Like many of his gen Z contemporaries, he’s thoroughly disillusioned with the mainstream kind. “The two parties that have been in power for 100-plus years have done nothing. The economy’s a mess,” he scoffs. But if he sounds like the kind of anti-establishment young person who once rallied to the radical left, Josh’s frustration has taken him in another direction. An ardent leaver in his teens, who backed Boris Johnson in 2019, he now belongs to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

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