The Trump chaos is just beginning and it looks like Starmer will give him whatever he wants

The chaos around Donald Trump's ignorant and capricious 'economic' policy is not over but just beginning. There is no question that having produced a tariff policy based on the flimsiest of economic calculations, the disastrous early impact resulted in a panicked climbdown.

Global markets appear to have sort of given a sigh of relief before realising that even what remains would have been seen as an economic earthquake a few months ago. It is also quite clear that the US is going to continue to make policy based on whim for the foreseeable future. In the context of this, Trump clearly thinks his best bet is to try and isolate nations and pick them off one by one.

That places a lot of weight on trade negotiations. This is a deep concern in many ways. At the global level, this could lead the weakest, poorest countries to end up with the most onerous and damaging trade terms, causing global economic and political imbalance to worsen. Turmoil is all-but the best outcome.

As a country which is not among the weaker in the global south, the UK should be in a different position. In fact given that the 'formula' for tariffs that Trump used had placed the UK one the bottom baseline tariff anyway and that that tariff remains in place suggests that the UK is one of the nations which is now in a comparatively stable position.

Unfortunately we are being led by one of the most supine and craven politicians imaginable in Keir Starmer. His whole strategy is to ingratiate himself to the Trump administration under all circumstances and under no circumstances even hint at any difference of view. No, it's worse than that, it's not that the UK no longer hints at difference in policy, it actively boosts Trumps worst delusions.

It is in this context today that the SNP calls for the NHS to be off the agenda in trade negotiations. What should worry you is the extent and reach of the things the UK Government should be setting as a red line in trade negotiations. In fact the list of aspects of UK domestic policy and practice which should not be up for discussion are too extensive to cover in this briefing.

Among them are: the privatisation and marketisation of public services and any steps to increase access to public funding by US corporations; virtually all laws and regulations around data and online services, not least safeguarding; all domestic tax decisions; food regulation of any description or any threat to reduce the quality of what we eat; anything that displaces domestic economic ownership with US ownership; the further sell-off of national assets to US equity firms; anything to do with regulation and banking and de-risking the finance sector; any policy and regulation related to environmental protection and climate change; any domestic policy, law or regulation which is unrelated to trade, especially freedom of speech laws and laws about protest and dissent....

To put that another way, it is much harder to identify things that Starmer ought to be talking to Trump about than to think of things it would make sense to talk to Trump about.

Despite everything that has happened, still the 'dismal science' of orthodox globalised US-policed free trade neoliberalism dominates the economic discussion in Britain. The assumption that a trade deal with the US is a good thing in its own right and that the assumption of major concessions is non-negotiable remains dominant.

What no-one will tell you is what we really want out of these negotiations. The truth is that the UK doesn't need a new trade deal with the US, but it needs to take the knee so that the US will keep providing and servicing Trident missiles and continue to facilitate the entire military and global surveillance apparatus of the UK.

And that's before recognising that Wes Streeting wants to open the NHS to more private provision anyway, Starmer probably supports further crackdowns on dissent and protest, the UK Government is already ditching environmental regulation and talking like climate change deniers, Labour is already briefing on big concessions to UK tech firms including dropping the Digital Services Tax...

The UK is about to enter negotiations in which it really doesn't and shouldn't need to negotiate from a weak hand – but we'll do it anyway. And we really shouldn't have to make big concessions to a nation whose trade balance with the UK is positive, but it looks like we will, not for economic reasons but for narrow geopolitical ones.

Starmer is going to give Trump what he wants because it's in his nature, and the rest of us will feel the blowback.