Liberation Day: will Keir Starmer surrender to Donald Trump's tariffs?

Britain is bracing for a barrage of tariffs on its exports to the US. Tomorrow, a day dubbed "Liberation Day" by Donald Trump, the US president is set to hit goods from multiple countries with sweeping duties – in order, he says, to "overhaul our trade system to protect American workers and families".

Hopes that UK ministers could secure a last-minute exemption for British goods have been dashed by a Trump administration that is holding out for a "big bang" moment, said Steven Swinford, political editor of The Times.

The Americans "want to make a theatre of it", a government source told The Times. "They want to have the consistency of saying that they have done everything on the same day. It is a big challenge for us."

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What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer and his team had been working round the clock on ways to "swerve new export taxes", said Harry Cole, political editor at The Sun. But their "attempts to flatter the American chief into sparing British firms from the economic hit fell on deaf ears".

We now wait to see, said Stefan Boscia at Politico, "what rate of tariff the US chooses to put on the UK" and whether or not it ends up being "more lenient than feared". The "lingering question" now is not "how far Trump can take his trade wars, but how far he will", said Callum Jones in The Guardian.

US tariffs "have the potential to be hugely detrimental to Starmer's premiership and his hopes of galvanising economic growth", said Swinford in The Times.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds insisted today that no country is "better placed than the UK" to dodge a trade war with the US. But this did not stop Goldman Sachs downgrading its growth projection for the UK economy, even if Britain is eventually able to secure a carve-out from US tariffs. And the Office for Budget Responsibility said that five years of US tariffs at 20% or 25% would "knock out all the headroom the government currently has".

What next?

The UK has prepared a "range of possible means to retaliate", and they are "ready to go", said The Telegraph. But – unlike the EU, which responded immediately to the earlier US steel tariffs with retaliatory tariffs on everything from Harley-Davidson motorcycles to Levi's jeans – "the PM is unlikely to pull the trigger straightaway, instead preferring a more measured approach to negotiations".

If Britain receives "little in the way of special treatment, Starmer will come under pressure to take a harsher stance", said Katy Balls, political editor of The Spectator. Already, some MPs are "expressing concerns", and others are looking at how Canada's new PM Mark Carney has "stood up to Trump, with some positive results both in terms of tariff negotiations and a poll bounce".

This "could be the week" that Starmer finally "has to stand up to the US president" and put "retaliatory measures on the table".