Trump tariffs live: Starmer vows to ‘shelter’ UK businesses as Jaguar Land Rover halts shipments to US – UK Times

Tesla CEO and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, has taken public swipes at Donald Trump’s adviser on trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, who helped shape the president’s reciprocal tariff policy that tanked markets across the world.

Mr Musk is typically vocal in his support and defense of the president, but has been quiet since Mr Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement that killed $2.5 trillion from the US stock market — a loss of value that cost the Tesla CEO more than $30bn, according to CNBC.

A user on X posted a video from CNN in which Mr Navarro defends the tariffs, noting positively that he went to Harvard. Mr Musk took issue with that, calling it a “bad thing.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Washington and discuss US tariffs imposed by Donald Trump among other issues, the Israeli leader’s office said on Saturday.

Netanyahu’s office said in a statement the prime minister, who is visiting Hungary, would depart for Washington on Sunday.

Four Israeli officials and a White House official said previously that Netanyahu was due to meet with Mr Trump tomorrow.

The impromptu in-person visit could be the first effort by a foreign leader to negotiate a deal with Mr Trump to remove tariffs.

But if the UK’s 10 per cent import tariffs to the American market compared to the EU’s 20 per cent, is the best economic justification for Brexit that can be made, then supporters of leaving the EU are clutching at straws.

The first and most obvious point is that Brexit has not spared the UK from having tariffs imposed on it by the one world leader who was the biggest cheerleader outside Britain for the UK leaving the EU.

Prime minister Keir Starmer said he was ready to step in to help “shelter” the country’s businesses from the fallout from Donald Trump’s new tariff policies, mooting state intervention for the worst-affected industries.

“We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm,” Sir Keir wrote in the Telegraph newspaper.

“Some people may feel uncomfortable about this – the idea the state should intervene directly to shape the market has often been derided.

“But we simply cannot cling on to old sentiments when the world is turning this fast.

While Sir Keir said the government’s priority remains to try and secure a trade deal with the US which could include tariff exemptions, he said he will do “everything necessary” to protect the national interest.

Britain was spared the most punitive treatment in Mr Trump’s tariff announcement on Wednesday when it was hit with the lowest import duty rate of 10 per cent , but a global trade war will hurt its open economy.

Almost no countries were spared from president Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs; even small, uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean were included in the exhaustive list. But one country was notably missing: Russia.

One of the United States’ largest adversaries was omitted from the list of countries slapped with even the 10 percent baseline tariff – a move that raised some eyebrows given Trump’s previously friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump has imposed the steepest American tariffs on imports in over a century, levying rates as high as 50 per cent on some countries in a move described by the EU as a “major blow” to the world economy.

The US president shocked global market on Wednesday as he announced minimum tariffs of at least 10 per cent on almost all exporters to the US, with much higher duties for countries that enjoy the largest trade surpluses.

Southeast Asian nations and some of the world’s weakest economies were hardest hit, compounding the effects of the Trump administration’s cuts to the USAID programme in many of those countries.

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Tariffs are back in the headlines this week, with United States President Donald Trump introducing sweeping new tariffs of at least 10 per cent on a vast range of goods imported to the US. For some countries and goods, the tariffs will be much higher.

Analysts have expressed shock and worry, warning the move could lead to inflation and possibly even recession for the US.

As someone who’s spent years researching the economy of Ancient Rome, it all feels a shade familiar.

Tariffs that will make exporting goods to America more costly could hit shopping baskets in the UK as producers around the globe look to recoup the extra costs.

Donald Trump‘s levies mean industries worldwide are scrambling to assess what the impact on them will be and there is no doubt that consumers in the US will see prices there rise as manufacturers pass on those costs to the buyer.

But that in turn means that many might opt out of paying higher prices, while businesses in America might cancel orders coming in from overseas to avoid paying those extra costs. That might mean raising prices elsewhere to reduce their losses.

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