The tabloids are very mad about Starmer’s deal, and that softens me a bit on it. The fact that it’s not a flashy deal is actually alright by me.
Background though, I was at the Battle of Seattle as a kid - I still have that jaundiced eye towards trade with China, and I think the decades since have proved the protestors largely correct.
Wait why are you against trade with China?
I didn’t say I was - at this point it’d be closing the gates after the horse has bolted. We rely on Chinese labour and manufacturing now, now hardly anything is made in America, and the downward spiral of empire is playing out exactly as it has several times before.
I’m not shedding any tears for the American empire (far from it), but the anarchists and labour protestors who thought it was a bad idea to let China into the WTO over two decades ago are not surprised by how it all turned out.
What annoys me with our relationships with both the US and China is that they both result in us selling our R&D to them. We perform well above our size in technology, yet we don’t guard our home-grown companies against the predatory antics of these two much larger “partners” .
People ask where the British (or even European) Google, Meta, Tiktok or Huawei is. The answer is that they are in the belly of some tech giant that gobbled them up. If we incubated our small companies more, we’d be competing on a different level.
result in us selling our R&D to them
They have cheaper money so scale. Always has been a problem.
