Not surprisingly, Labour ministers are claiming the imposition of “only” a 10% across-the-board tariff on UK exports to America (excluding steel, aluminium and automobiles, already hit with a 25% rate) as vindication of their diplomatic skill in dealing with Donald Trump (‘It could’ve been much worse’: how UK avoided a bigger blow from Trump tariffs, 5 April).
In fact, the figure of 10% owes less to diplomacy and rather more to the method used to calculate the tariff. The algorithm applied is simple (and simplistic) in the extreme: the tariff equals either the total deficit in US trade with a particular country, divided by the value of that country’s exports to America and then halved, or a default 10%, whichever is larger (Trump’s ‘idiotic’ and flawed tariff calculations stun economists, 3 April).
