Mike's Minute: Free trade will survive these tariffs

Keir Starmer is fast becoming a new political hero. 

For a bloke who stumbled into office not on his brilliance or a nationwide passion for the Labour Party, but more because the Tories had spent 14 years slowly messing the place up, he turns out to be quite the operator. 

He is reforming public health because it's fat and useless. He is trimming welfare because there are too many layabouts. 

He has handled Trump as well as anyone, and better than most, both on tariffs and the war. 

Now he has rejected that hackneyed old sop of a patriotic "Buy British" campaign in response to America's moves. 

Canada hasn’t. They are flat out hating on America, and in some senses, it's working. Tourism is down in America as Canadians go elsewhere. But all the rest of it is anecdotal as they pull American booze off shelves in a massive huff. 

So the idea was, like it was here a number of times over the years and like it is currently in Australia as part of their election campaign, you run the flag up a pole, get everyone fizzed up about their country and their heritage and their ability to make stuff and whittle and dig and toil and sweat and the punter, so enamoured with your skills and graft, buys the locally made brilliance. 

And we all live happily ever after. 

There is value in patriotism and pride in some local stories. 

But even in Britain, where a lot of stuff was born or invented, the world has moved on and Starmer knows it. 

People buy on either quality or price and sometimes a bit of both. 

They don’t buy blindly, they don’t want crap and they won't support their own for the sake of it. If they did Temu would never have been invented. 

This whole tariff thing will pass and this Starmer gets. Free trade will survive, if not thrive. Starmer gets it. President Xi gets it. 

Good ideas don’t die with the arrival of an economic Neanderthal. They may be paused or dented, but they don’t die. 

Land Rover thrives because, yes it's British, but also because it's good, as do Fortnum and Mason and Barbour wax jackets. 

Buying local is isolationism. Most of us worked that out a long time ago. 

This is no time to regress.

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