By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-04-05 18:51:02 | Updated at 2025-04-06 12:29:08
17 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is calling on London not to retaliate against President Trump’s new 10% tariff on British goods — for its own good.
“I don’t think it is in the UK’s best interest to retaliate,” the former Labor Party leader told students at King’s College London, The Independent reported Friday.
But he quickly admitted he was unsure what the next development in the tariff battle would be after that, the outlet reported.
Blair, who left office in 2007 after a decade in power, hailed current Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration for its “cool heads” since Trump veiled his “Liberation Day” levies, which featured a 10% baseline and higher rates for countries with which the US has a trade deficit.
The UK was walloped with the new fees despite being one of the major world economies with which the US has a trade surplus, amounting to $11.9 billion last year, according to office of the US Trade Representative.
Trump claimed Thursday that Starmer was “very happy” about the new tariffs — though the PM’s foreign secretary David Lammy said the British government was “very concerned” about America’s “return to protectionism.”
Trump said in February he was interested in “a real trade deal” with the UK “where the tariffs wouldn’t be necessary.”
The White House explained the 10% baseline tariff as a tactic to avoid circumvention of the tougher “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries and trading blocs, such as Trump’s 20% rate for the 27-nation European Union.
The reciprocal tariffs were loosely based on the US trade imbalance with targets — with an administration official saying it was “based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.”
Initial reactions from targets include a conciliatory call from manufacturing hub Vietnam, whose Communist Party general secretary To Lam phoned Trump to pledge to “cut their tariffs down to ZERO” in a bid to avoid a 46% tariff under the new policies, Trump said Friday.
China took the opposite approach — announcing retaliatory tariffs after Trump placed a new 34% charge on Chinese goods.
Critics of Trump’s tariffs, which triggered a dramatic stock selloff, say that his reciprocal formula ignores the fact that certain countries have a comparative advantage in producing goods due to their lower labor costs, natural resources or climates more suitable to certain agricultural products.
Madagascar, the world’s top exporter of vanilla, faces a new 47% tariff. Iraq and Guyana, whose exports are primarily petroleum, were hit with 39% and 38% rates, respectively.
Countries whose exports are dominated by clothing and textiles assembled by low-wage workforces also saw enormous levies, including Bangladesh (37%), Mauritius (40%) and Sri Lanka (44%) — dragging down US retail stocks.
