Starmer will try to calm the situation and focus on May’s local elections, but one thing is clear: our ties with Europe are more crucial than ever

Nobody wins a trade war. You can lose it by greater or lesser degrees: you may be one of the luckier casualties. But that’s about as good as it gets. So, while there will have been initial relief in Downing Street on Wednesday night, a feeling even that Keir Starmer’s placating of Donald Trump looks vindicated, what followed was no victory lap.

How could it be, after that grotesquely swaggering show trial the president staged in the White House garden, all the better to jazz up an economic assault on what were once his country’s allies? Come on down, Britain, escaping with just the minimum 10% tariff on its exports to the US and no drive-by insults! Better than Taiwan (32% plus a lecture about how the US used to build all the semiconductors once), Vietnam (“They like me, I like them� but still a brutal 46%), the EU (“very very tough traders� and lucky to get away with 20%) or poor Lesotho, still reeling from the overnight collapse of US aid and now whacked by a 50% tariff. But even lucky Britain still emerged with a 25% duty on cars that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates could cost 25,000 jobs, plus the grim realisation that this may be just the beginning of a long unravelling. Globalisation is dead, protectionism is back, and all to satisfy one man’s delusions that life was better in the 1800s before income tax was invented.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The latest escalation and attempts to dismantle the Palestinian leadership are utterly at odds with peace negotiations

• Sanam Vakil is a senior research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House

Against the pleas and protests of hostage families desperate to secure the release of their loved ones, the Israeli government is moving ahead with the military occupation of the Gaza Strip. On 2 April, the defence minister, Israel Katz, announced plans to seize large areas of Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas’s remaining infrastructure and establishing new security zones that will split Gaza in two. This escalation, which began in mid-March with intensified airstrikes, is intended to encourage a mass exodus of the local population, and has led to substantial civilian casualties. ​

Despite the international outcry over more than 50,000 deaths, 110,000 civilian injuries and significant displacement of Palestinians, the Israeli government rationalises and justifies these moves as necessary for security against an undefeated Hamas. Ultimately, though, Israel’s actions imperil the fragile ceasefire negotiations, its broader credibility and wider hopes for a political process to end the conflict. In reality, this would be the only viable path to stability and security.

While the president has identified the need to do things differently, his strategy risks a slump, hitting the very Americans he claims to champion

It would be “liberation day� in the US, the White House announced. Well, we shall see. Yet even if one puts the noise and nastiness that accompany a Donald Trump announcement to one side – in this case tonight’s pronouncement that there will be an executive order announcing “reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world�, a 10% tariff on the UK and 20% on the EU – the significance of the theatre is hard to miss. Whether they presage the US’s liberation, or instead the disintegration of the global trading order, Trump’s tariffs add up to an attempt to transform a badly broken economic model. And that is something that affects us all.

Trump’s announcement was awash with insult and rambling nonsense. The rest of the world had looted, raped and pillaged, had scavenged and ransacked America – shocking claims if they had come from any other US president, yet water off a duck’s back today. But the hard core was there all the same: tariffs on the whole of the rest of the world. The shutters were up.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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I bought it to be part of a greener future, but that was before Musk proved so awful. I’d sell it now, but prices have dropped

After our children left home, my wife and I decided to treat ourselves and buy a new car for a driving holiday in Europe. We’d been driving a family estate car for years, loading it up with kids and making trips to and from universities, but we wanted something for ourselves.

As a surprise, she booked a test drive for the Tesla Model S for my birthday. It was unlike any car I’d been in before. I thought “Wow, this is amazing.� It felt like the future: a computer on wheels that was constantly updating with new features. I can’t say I feel that way now – and many people seem to share that view. Tesla sales figures declined by 13% in the first few months of this year. Others feel even more uneasy: more than 200 demonstrations happened last weekend outside company facilities around the world to protest against Elon Musk and the wrecking ball he has taken to the federal government.

The country’s so-called political centre has licensed a new era of authoritarianism – to the AfD’s delight

A crackdown on political dissent is well under way in Germany. Over the past two years, institutions and authorities have cancelled events, exhibitions and awards over statements about Palestine or Israel. There are many examples: the Frankfurt book fair indefinitely postponing an award ceremony for Adania Shibli; the Heinrich Böll Foundation withdrawing the Hannah Arendt prize from Masha Gessen; the University of Cologne rescinding a professorship for Nancy Fraser; the No Other Land directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham being defamed by German ministers. And, most recently, the philosopher Omri Boehm being disinvited from speaking at this month’s anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald.

In nearly all of these cases, accusations of antisemitism loom large – even though Jews are often among those being targeted. More often than not, it is liberals driving or tacitly accepting these cancellations, while conservatives and the far right lean back and cheer them on. While vigilance against rising antisemitism is no doubt warranted – especially in Germany – that concern is increasingly weaponised as a political tool to silence the left.

Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics

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Leftwing policies have mass appeal – what’s needed is a figurehead who can bring back alienated voters and dodge culture wars

Tony Blair’s devotees always had a stock response for their leftwing critics, and it went like this: your desire for political purity will render Labour unelectable, and the poorest will pay the price. A Labour party led by “sensible moderates� may not be your first choice, but it is the only hope for the most vulnerable.

As Labour imposes poverty on up to 400,000 people through cuts to disability benefits, according to estimates by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this argument is submerged under a tidal wave of misery. The government has already robbed many pensioners of their winter fuel payments, and not only voted to keep a Tory two-child benefit cap that imposes squalor on hundreds of thousands of children, but suspended those Labour MPs who opposed it. A Labour party that knowingly imposes hardship on disabled people, pensioners and children has filed for moral and political bankruptcy.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

This vital drama has British actors, a British writer, but Netflix funding. Here’s why that’s a huge problem

Everyone is talking about Adolescence, the television drama focused on toxic masculinity that has triggered a continuing social and political debate. But only a handful of people are talking about what the hit drama says about the real-time crisis unfolding in the British television industry – and that needs discussion too.

Adolescence is everything public service broadcasting should be: hard-hitting programming featuring the kind of people often ignored in TV drama – in this case, white working-class families in the north – discussed at the school gate and in parliament. After its British writer, Jack Thorne, met Keir Starmer in Downing Street, it was revealed that Adolescence was to be rolled out for free across all UK secondary schools.

It seems to me that whatever the charges facing the activists at the Quaker meeting house raid, their fundamental crime is dissent

The faces are different, but it’s the same authoritarianism. Keir Starmer’s team might not look or sound like Donald Trump’s, but its policies on protest and dissent are chillingly similar. So is the reason: coordinated global lobbying by the rich and powerful, fronted by rightwing junktanks.

Last week, six young women were having tea and biscuits in the Quaker meeting house in Westminster. Twenty police officers forced open the door and arrested them on conspiracy charges. Had the police discovered a plot to blow up parliament or to poison the water supply? No. It was an openly advertised, routine meeting of a protest group called Youth Demand, discussing climate breakdown and the assault on Gaza.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, was published in paperback last week

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Watching the New Jersey senator hold court for 25 hours felt radical and cathartic

One of the problems beleaguering political opponents of Donald Trump has been finding a form of protest that, given the scale of his outrages, doesn’t seem entirely futile. You can parade outside a Tesla showroom. You can hold up dumb little signs during Trump’s address to Congress inscribed with slogans such as “This is not normal� and “Musk steals�. You can, as Democrats appear to have been doing since the election, play dead.

Alternatively, you can go for the ostentatious, performative gesture. On Monday evening, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator for New Jersey who carries himself like someone who’d have been happier in an era when men wore capes, started speaking on the floor of the Senate and carried on for 25 hours and five minutes, breaking the chamber’s record by almost 50 minutes and delivering – finally – a solid, usable symbol of rebellion.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

To prevent a catastrophic failure of the drugs modern medicine relies on, look to animal farming in middle-income countries

If the antibiotics we use to treat infections ever stopped working, the consequences would be catastrophic. It is estimated that the use of antibiotics adds about 20 years of life expectancy for every person worldwide (on average). As the King’s Fund put it, if we lose antibiotics, “we would lose modern medicine as we know it�. Doctors, public health experts and governments take the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) very seriously, yet the problem appears to be getting worse.

A report from the National Audit Office in February finds that out of five domestic targets set in 2019 to tackle AMR, only one has been met – to reduce antibiotic use in food-producing animals. Others, such as the target to reduce drug-resistant infections in humans by 10%, haven’t made much progress; in fact, these infections have actually increased by 13% since 2018.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

Loyalists worry that the PM displays little of the engagement and dynamism required. Five years on, neither they nor voters really know him or his plan

Upsetting backbench MPs is an occupational hazard for prime ministers. Government is an endless sequence of messy compromises. Incumbency is a drag on popularity. Poll ratings sink and nerves fray. Careers are thwarted. There are fewer ministerial jobs than ambitious candidates.

This is normal party discontentment. It grows over the course of a parliament, becoming critical at the point when rebel numbers threaten the leader’s majority. By that metric, Keir Starmer can afford to provoke a lot of dissatisfaction in the ranks. And, together with Rachel Reeves, he has.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

It is a factually inaccurate and totally, utterly wrong to say that undocumented people are ‘illegal’ and are ‘criminals’

On 29 January, the second Trump administration held its first White House press briefing. “Of the 3,500 arrests Ice has made so far since President Trump came back into office, can you just tell us the numbers?� asked a reporter in the front row. “How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?�

“All of them,� responded the new White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, making her debut in the briefing room, “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.� She continued: “I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal. But that’s exactly what they are.�

Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and author, and a former host on MSNBC. He is also a Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief of Zeteo

British Muslims are too often acceptable only when they bake cakes or win medals. Now the nation has had a true insight into our faith

If anything is going to get me to turn on BBC One early on Eid morning, it’s Eid prayer being televised on a UK terrestrial channel for the first time in British broadcasting history. Held at Bradford Central Mosque, the groundbreaking coverage on Monday followed the entirety of the Eid prayer – starting with Qur’anic recitation, then a sermon in both English and Arabic and the congregational prayer itself, culminating in the customary eid mubarak embraces.

For Muslims like me, these scenes are part and parcel of every Eid. The keffiyeh-draped uncles sporting orange beards dyed with henna, some to emulate the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and some simply to hide their grey hairs; the children using the congregation as an assault course and scouting out the auntie who is handing out the best sweets; fancy clothes, henna-patterned palms and smiling faces; people high on both the spirituality of the just-passed holy month and probably too much sugar. This is the stuff Eid is made of, but watching it unfold on the nation’s main TV channel was a refreshing novelty – and I found it strangely affirming, as well as a little emotional, to witness.

Nadeine Asbali is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain, and a secondary school teacher in London

The speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is dizzying, but if we organise resistance now we can stop this

Everything is moving too fast. The Trump-Musk administration is tearing through US government, universities and health organisations, firing tens of thousands of employees, eliminating billons in funding. The scope and speed of the attack is dizzying. It is almost impossible to keep up with the ongoing destruction, let alone to organise the resistance. None of this is accidental.

We need to understand the origins of the Trump blitzkrieg to counter it in the US and prevent it from spreading abroad. The speed of the attack can be traced to Trump strategist and “accelerationist� Steve Bannon, and aligns with his information warfare tactic to “flood the zone� to confuse, disengage and disorient. Whether on climate or Covid, rumours, lies and conspiracy theories create a chaotic cacophony, leaving the public disoriented, fearful and prey to oversimple Trumpist messages: blame the woke, migrants, transgender people, Muslims, doctors, scientists. Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X supports Bannon’s agenda.

Julia Steinberger is professor of societal challenges of climate change at the University of Lausanne

My bungee-jumping and skydiving days are over because I can’t shake the visceral memory of learning that I’m not invincible

I’d just completed the spectacular four-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu and, drunk on nature, was feeling dangerously invincible. Fresh Peruvian air still rejuvenated my lungs and the brain fog induced by my daily smartphone addiction hadn’t yet crept back in.

The disastrous events that followed began once I turned my phone back on. Responding to a Twitter solicitation for Peru recommendations, a man I’d never met posted: “Go mountain biking down a volcano in Arequipa!�

Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author

Working in finance, I was unhappy and surrounded by greed. Then I embraced my passion for cooking, produce and nature

• Franco Fubini is the founder and CEO of Natoora

As I wandered out of my New York apartment, the snow compressing on to the sidewalk in that warming dusk light gave my walk to Citarella’s on Third Avenue a rhythmic glow. It was 1999 and Christmas was a few weeks away. In the northern hemisphere, December is the season for vibrant citrus, bitter leaves and pumpkins, yet behind me someone called out: “Where can I find peaches?� I turned around to see an affronted woman standing outside the greengrocer’s. The absurdity of the moment struck me – why would someone crave peaches in the middle of winter? It is just as absurd as sitting by the pool on a blistering summer day and reaching for a warm, woolly jumper.

I was already aware of the issues facing the food system; industrialised farming destroying our soils, the stomach of our planet, opaque supply chains leaving citizens powerless in making the right buying decisions, and the dominance of ultra-processed foods with zero nutritional value in supermarkets, schools and hospitals, to name a few. But this moment underscored our grave disconnect with nature and its seasons. We had normalised the idea that food can and should be eaten any time of the year. I couldn’t escape from this realisation, but little did I know that seemingly innocuous encounter in New York was to change my life for ever.

Franco Fubini is the founder and CEO of Natoora, and author of In Search of the Perfect Peach

The cacophony around me seemed to drown out my daily worries until a writing retreat showed me there was a better way

I’ve lived in South Korea for more than a decade, but it’s only recently that I discovered just how loud it is here. The bing-bong when someone presses the “stop� button on the city bus, and the accompanying sing-songy announcements in Korean, the beeps of riders scanning their transit cards to board or depart; soju-drunk office workers loudly singing off-tune through neighbourhood alleyways; obnoxiously loud K-pop music blaring out of storefronts; and songs that seem to change key at record rates as delivery motorbikes speed out of range.

In reality, I have relied on there being near-constant cacophony around me for the whole of my adult life. Without realising it, background noise became a kind of comfort to me, making me feel less alone. It started after university when I was barely scraping together a living, working jobs I didn’t want to be doing. I would soothe my loneliness and isolation in the evenings by playing endless hours of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit just for the ambient sound – the comfort of Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler bringing criminals of the worst kind to justice.

Krissi Driver is a writer based in South Korea

I couldn’t help but love the woman who brought light back into our lives – and now I feel so lucky to have my big blended family

When my mother died, I didn’t think my stepfather would ever find someone else to love. She met him when visiting New York and he moved to Paris to live with us. He’d always ask: “How’d this gorgeous French-Brazilian woman pick me?� They shared 16 beautiful years together. On the night of her death, he told me he’d “lost 40 years�, the years of them growing old together.

As much as I wanted him to be happy, I never imagined their connection could be replaced, it just seemed too strong. So when, one spring evening over dinner, he said “I went on a date last night� to my little sister and me, my eyes grew wide in shock. I was pleased for him, but devastated for myself. It felt like another era was coming to an end.

Iman M’Fah-Traoré is a writer. She is working on her first book, a memoir

The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created

For the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.

Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters� and “scavengers� who “looted�, “raped� and “pillaged� the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.�

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Impunity over Palestinian deaths in Gaza will lead to further cases like this massacre of rescue and healthcare workers

After 18 months of slaughter, it is still possible to be shocked by events in Gaza. More than 50,000 people have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities. More are starving because Israel has cut off aid. The offensive is intensifying again – with 100 children killed or maimed each day since Israel resumed heavy strikes last month, the UN reports.

Even so, Israel’s killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers is particularly chilling. Though they died on 23 March, it took days for Israel to grant access to the site, the UN said. Another man was last seen in Israeli custody. Two grounds for seeing this not only as tragic but as a war crime stand out. The first is that the UN says the men were shot “one by one�, and a forensic expert said that preliminary evidence “suggests they were executed, not from a distant range�, given the “specific and intentional� locations of bullet wounds. Two witnesses said some of the bodies had their hands or legs tied. Prisoners are protected by the Geneva conventions. The second is that medics also enjoy specific protections.

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The White House and tech oligarchs are using free speech arguments as cover to suffocate any European attempt to regulate digital space

In 1858, when London could no longer tolerate the stench of raw effluent in the Thames, city authorities commissioned a system of sewers that operates to this day. A century later, when noxious fog choked the capital, parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, limiting coal fire emissions.

When a dangerous toxin assails the senses, polluting public space to the detriment of all that use it, the case for legislation is self-evident. The argument is more complex when the poison has no chemical properties; when it exists in a virtual realm. This is the conceptual challenge for regulation of digital content. It is made all the more complex by conflation with arguments about free speech and censorship.

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Labour must ignore the business lobbies and forge ahead with Angela Rayner’s landmark employment rights bill

A few years ago, the Harvard professor Michael Sandel used an episode in his Radio 4 series The Public Philosopher to discuss perspectives on the value of work. Canvassing the views of a Dagenham audience ranging from low-paid retail employees to white‑collar professionals, Prof Sandel drew two principal conclusions: work was widely viewed as a potential source of self-esteem and communal purpose; but for too many its oppressive reality was one of stress, precarity and a sense of disempowerment.

Some of the bleak consequences of that divide are outlined in the impact assessments accompanying Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill, which is now passing through the House of Lords. In 2022/23, for example, 17.1m working days were lost due to stress, depression or anxiety – equivalent to an estimated £5bn in lost output. Around 2 million employees reported anxiety due to a lack of clarity over the number of hours they will work, or shifts suddenly being changed. A lack of adequate employment protection means that some 4,000 pregnant women and mothers returning from maternity leave lose their jobs each year.

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The anxiety and horror of these sweeping cuts are a matter of deliberate policy. How did the party of Bevan come to this?

What has just happened, and where are we now? Three long weeks ago, the government began to announce all those cuts to disability and sickness benefits – aimed, they said, at saving £5bn by the end of this decade. Then, only hours before Rachel Reeves’s emergency financial “update�, the seemingly omnipotent Office for Budget Responsibility said that the clawbacks would total significantly less, which prompted the Treasury to not only halve the money paid to new claimants of the incapacity benefit element of universal credit, but freeze its current levels until 2030. Cruelty had followed cruelty: by last Thursday, when it became clear that a record 4.5 million children in the UK are living in poverty, Oxfam was calling these moves “morally repugnant�.

In some quarters, pundits and politicians have moved on from the controversy all this has caused, and are busy speculating about whether the chancellor will soon have to put up taxes. But at the heart of our politics, there is now an inescapable certainty, which will flare up spectacularly when some of the cuts to benefits are put to a parliamentary vote: the fact that Reeves, Keir Starmer and their colleagues are set on immiserating millions of disabled people.

As claims pile up about the charity he founded, he’s learning that smiling and biting your lip can be quite painful. Hear, hear, as the Windsors might say

Straight faces, please, as we try to look charitably at the toxic row engulfing Prince Harry’s charity. Are you up to speed with this everyday story of giving folk? I’m in such a muddle with it all that I can’t remember if I’m allowed to say that purely from my observations of her telly interviews, Sentebale chair Sophie Chandauka does seem like a right old loose cannon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s do a quick recap. Sentebale is a charity to help children and young people with HIV and Aids in Lesotho and Botswana, and was set up almost two decades ago by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, in honour of their mothers. Its current chair is Chandauka, a Zimbabwean lawyer, and something about her stewardship of the charity has provoked its entire board of trustees to judge that their relationship has broken down irretrievably. Accordingly, they have all resigned. Chandauka in turn has said that the charity was riddled with “poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny [and] misogynoir�, and accused Prince Harry of “harassment and bullying at scale�.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

US tariffs hit this week just as other costs start to bite in Britain. To meet these challenges, Labour will finally have to change

The prime minister may pretend to “like and respect� Donald Trump, but elsewhere in parliament anti-Americanism is running hot. In a Lords debate on obesity last week, Labour’s Lord Brooke suggested imposing 25% tariffs on “American products which are causing us difficulties – Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, McDonald’s�. The government replied that the US is an “indispensable ally�. That craven attitude may be politic today – right until it fails tomorrow.

The outlook for Britain and other countries is bleak. Wednesday is “liberation day�, when Trump’s tariffs will hit a range of goods likely to send global economies tumbling. There is near-zero expectation that Britain’s genuflections will save us from the same punishment as the rest. As for Trump demanding no VAT on US imports to the UK, that’s extorting with menaces a benefit denied to our own producers. Even if kissing the boot did appease, how cheap do we sell national dignity?

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Sudan’s capital has been hollowed out and stripped for parts, its people trampled beneath a conflict that is far from over

Ten days ago, in a major turning point in almost two years of war, the Sudanese army reclaimed the capital city from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia which took it over in 2023. What little we know so far paints a picture of a city ravaged by unimaginable horror.

The war has sent Sudan hurtling into the largest humanitarian disaster in the world, triggering genocide in the west of the country, and starvation there and in other areas. Previously allies in power, the RSF – formalised and expanded from the remnants of the Janjaweed militia – and the Sudanese military went to war when their partnership fell apart. The victims have been the Sudanese people, whose lives were trampled beneath. Khartoum’s centrality in the war, both in its prosperity and in terms of what it represents for the RSF as the seat of power, has meant the city has been subjected to a particularly intense and vengeful campaign: the RSF seized it and then proceeded not to govern the city, but strip it and terrorise its inhabitants.

The chance of the president succeeding in his radicalism is small, but amid the chaos are challenges to convention that were overdue

“Move fast and break things� was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto in launching Facebook 20 years ago. It seemed the antithesis of management-school custom and practice. But it worked, to be imitated after a fashion by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other digital tycoons with similar success. Donald Trump is now seeing if it works in government.

The smart money in Washington was that after the fiasco of Trump’s first term, his second would see a more emollient president, one careful of his reputation. He would reach out, consult, become a peacemaker, in his desperation to become a Nobel president like Barack Obama.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The chancellor boosted defence spending while piling on further welfare cuts – all set against gloomy growth forecasts

It’s Groundhog Day: the party may change but even under Labour, the script remains stubbornly the same

It is time to resuscitate Margaret Thatcher’s catchphrase: “There is no alternative.� With a twist, of course. Back then, “Tina� was deployed in favour of an economic model that gave us badly distributed low growth, shambolic rip-off privatised utilities, a housing crisis and social insecurity. It is now devastatingly clear that there is no alternative to discarding this failed experiment.

Yet this week, our supposedly Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will take a scalpel to departmental budgets already devastated by 15 years of austerity. Our government has robbed most pensioners of the winter fuel payment, and announced £5bn worth of cuts to disability benefits, which strip support from citizens unable to independently clothe themselves, or who need an aide to use the toilet. By the time of the next election, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, all households will have suffered a fall in living standards, but the poorest will be clobbered twice as hard. This, under the rule of a party founded to represent the interests of ordinary people.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

We absolutely won’t tolerate leaks, they said before looping in a journalist to top secret war plans. Feel safe? Me neither

Once again, we find ourselves having an anguished debate about mobile phones and online safety, in this case asking: should we ban the devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you know what your national security adviser is doing on his device? Is he using it to stay in touch with other guys in the big-man-osphere to talk about bombing Hooters? Or did he maybe add the editor-in-chief of a leading general interest magazine to a Signal group in the crucial period running up to a highly sensitive US military operation in Yemen, seemingly committing so many alleged crimes that he should have a full-body orange jumpsuit tattooed on him for ever?

By now, you will have caught up with the tale of one of the most idiotic breaches of security imaginable – seemingly executed, regrettably, by the actual US national security adviser. Mike Waltz seems to have been aided and abetted in his full-spectrum fatuity by other ultra-senior figures, including the vice-president, JD Vance, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed operational and strategic information in a chat to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally invited. Is Hegseth OK? Has he returned to being – how to put this delicately? – someone you probably don’t want to give important tasks to “after lunch�?

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Our exit from the EU won’t be a focus of the spring statement, but it should be. Most now accept the need for closer ties

As the chancellor ekes out every last billion this week, it’s worth stepping back and remembering one key reason why Britain fares worse than its neighbours: Brexit. On Monday, MPs debated whether to rejoin the EU following the success of a public petition that gained 134,000 signatures. Don’t hold your breath. The government replied by quoting its not-until-hell-freezes-over manifesto pledge: “there will be no return to EU membership�. But the global Trumpquake has shaken all certainties, upended all that seemed solid. The European defence emergency has made talk of Brexit and its future less taboo on both sides of the Channel. Close observers note the ice breaking. “Things are moving in the right direction,� says Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform (CER).

Nonetheless, Labour is so paralysed by Brexit that despite its hunt for growth, it has said nothing about the monumental sums that leaving the EU have cost the economy. Estimates vary, but the CER sets our losses at 5% of GDP. That’s a vast sum: 1% of Britain’s GDP is worth £25.6bn. Goldman Sachs’s calculations are similar. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that the UK lost £27bn in exports to the EU in the first two years; the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reckons Britain has seen a 15% reduction in trade.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

With the UK mired in gloom for the foreseeable future, how can the chancellor possibly think about enjoying herself?

The line is that Rachel Reeves had to accept Sabrina Carpenter tickets, reportedly worth £600, for security reasons. Sure, she could have bought her own tickets, but how safe would she be in a mosh pit, with her approval ratings at 58% against, 17% in favour? I would argue still pretty safe. I personally disapprove quite strongly of Reeves’s performance in the exchequer: her dispiriting, intellectually shonky defeatism (for decisions, apparently, that can’t be helped) and empty boosterism (for the growth she thinks she can conjure). Yet I wouldn’t dream of ruining an evening of bouncy pop by accosting her, which I’m sure goes for most Carpenter fans. I wouldn’t even give her a piece of my mind at some musically appropriate event, like a Billy Bragg concert.

Heidi Alexander started a half-hearted attempt to defend Reeves in an interview with Times Radio, which turned into an absolute knee-capping halfway through. “I actually sadly haven’t been to see any concerts at all over the last nine months,� said the transport secretary, “partly because I’ve been very, very busy.�

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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With the US president now warmer to Moscow than to Ottawa, it’s little surprise Canadians I met rolled their eyes at the decline of the special relationship

As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state – geographically or diplomatically – can be a precarious existence. All it takes is an aggressive new government in the stronger state and a relatively equal relationship of economic and military cooperation can suddenly turn exploitative, even threatening.

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, this realisation has been dawning across the west, but nowhere more disconcertingly than in Canada. Its border with the US is the longest in the world: 5,525 miles of often empty and hard to defend land, lakes and rivers. Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, are only a few hours to the north, were you to approach them in a US army tank.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

His targeting of foreigners with residencies or work visas was inevitable: to achieve his aims, more and more people must be disenfranchised

The imperial boomerang effect is the theory that techniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang� back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.

Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a case study in how systems built for those whose rights have been diluted or taken away eventually devour those who were assumed to be safe from such violations. There are three ways in which this process of rebounding happens. The first is through the creation of a domestic caste system that mirrors the one outside a country’s borders, as demonstrated in the recent treatment of those foreigners with permanent US residency and valid work visas who expressed dissenting views on Gaza.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Readers react to Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on goods imported into the US from

Martin Kettle considers it uncertain whether Donald Trump’s tariffs will work, while noting that even Keynes supported their occasional use (Perilous and chaotic, Trump’s ‘liberation day’ endangers the world’s broken economy – and him, 2 April). Such an open-minded view risks overoptimism. Keynes’s support for the idea of tariffs was limited to specific short-term need, as in protection of fledgling industry. But Keynes knew well the harm of tariffs as long-term economic policy.

Far from being uncertain, it is inevitable that Trump’s tariffs will fail. The deep interconnectedness of international supply chains means Americans will see a swift rise in inflation (that key growth-killer Trump campaigned to reduce) as indispensable worldwide component imports push up the price of domestic US goods and the reverse is repeated around the world.

Josephine Grahl advises looking at the labour burden placed on women and how social structures enforce this. Brid Connolly recalls Marge Piercy’s novel Body of Glass

Rachel Connolly has it the wrong way round when she suggests that one problem with heterosexuality is that women unrealistically expect men to fulfil a complete spectrum of emotional needs and desires (Social media is awash with ‘heteropessimism’. Do young women really think so poorly of men?, 31 March). As many surveys have shown – most recently in a study by Humboldt University – straight men are more likely to be dependent on their female partners and cope worse after separation or divorce.

Connolly suggests that online statements of “heteropessimism� are not being acted on, but Office for National Statistics figures from 2023 show a continuing increase in single households of all ages – a phenomenon that has persisted over the last few decades despite increasing social precarity, spiralling housing costs and what the US sociologist Bella DePaulo describes as the “singles tax� – the financial disadvantage incurred by those who live alone or are unmarried.

David Morgan remembers the singer-songwriter as the opening act at a John Martyn concert, and Trevor Brewster reminds us of her presence at the start ofan Amnesty International tour

Zadie Smith’s recollection of seeing Tracy Chapman on TV (Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’, 31 March) reminded me of attending a John Martyn concert at Sadler’s Wells in London in February 1988. When I enquired about who the support was, the reply was: “Just two girl singer-songwriters.�

First on stage was a quiet, shy dreadlocked young woman who performed her as yet unreleased debut album. Yes, Tracy Chapman. The audience were blown away. Second up was Tanita Tikaram, who was lovely and also went on to enjoy chart success. John Martyn was fabulous, as ever.
David Morgan
Fernwood, Nottinghamshire

Government departments | Rothko room | Objecting to the word ‘queer’ | Film canister bag | Male teachers

Two further UK government departments to add to the list, the first of which appears to be in operation already: Doze (the Department of Zero Effort) for managing communications and Dope (the Department of Preconceived Expectations) for managing disillusioned MPs.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London

• In terms of art therapy, half an hour spent in the Rothko room at Tate Modern at least once a year has done wonders for my mental health (Take two Van Goghs daily: the growing popularity of museum prescriptions, 31 March).
Peter de Voil
King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire

Anthony Richards thinks democracies must defeat dangerous ideologies at the ballot box, not in the courtroom, while Dave Pollard calls out the hypocrisy of the far right. Plus letters from Colin Leisk and Michel Gratton

While I abhor the politics of Marine Le Pen, I believe the recent decision by the French judiciary to bar her from running for public office for five years raises important and uncomfortable questions about the relationship between justice and democracy (Report, 31 March).

The idea that someone convicted of serious offences may be unfit for high office is entirely reasonable. But in this case, the use of relatively new legal powers – at a moment of high political consequence – risks appearing politically motivated, even if it isn’t. That perception matters. Democracies must defeat dangerous ideologies at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.

Readers respond to the US president’s intimidatory behaviour and his imposition of tariffs on imported goods

I could not agree more with Jonathan Freedland (Trump is upending everything. The world’s leaders must tell the truth about what that means, 28 March). This ever-increasing threat to world stability from both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is obvious to all, and our leaders’ fear of addressing it head-on is palpable. Our prime minister must now show leadership and speak openly to the country about this threat.

We live in an era where free speech has been stifled. We are in fear of reprisal from a few rich and powerful people who appear to be able to act with impunity. The US has always been our ally, and there is no reason why this should not continue. The Senate and the American people must initially take the responsibility by rectifying their error in electing this dictatorial president. What happened to impeachment? Richard Nixon was removed for, by comparison, a minor misdemeanour. If the American people do not act, they will bear the burden of shame when this is over.
Royston Evans
Charlton, Wiltshire

Britain should capitalise on an exodus of disaffected US bioscientists, writes Tony Barnett

I note fears that the Trump administration plans to cut funding for research on mRNA technology for vaccine development and other uses (27 March). The UK and other countries with global-level bioscience and associated research capabilities should now reap the benefits of decades of internal US investment. US academics from the biosciences and other fields are already beginning to trickle away from their beleaguered country.

The 1930s saw major moves to fund the migration of leading scientists and other intellectuals to the UK. Now is the time for our government to match the necessary increase in defence spending with a much cheaper programme to actively recruit those fleeing major US research facilities. This is a low-cost initiative with potential huge returns. A profitable transaction.

Male tears | Dog time | Half Man Half Biscuit | Mother’s Week | San Serriffe

Since the release of Adolescence on Netflix, there has been a lot of discussion about what it is to be male and toxic masculinity, which the Guardian has participated in. I was therefore particularly disappointed to see that the headline on your article about pigeon theft (1 April) began with “I cried like a little boy�. I appreciate that it comes from a quotation of an interviewee, but please don’t use subediting to reinforce ideas that grown men don’t cry. Surely we are all seeing the damage these nonsensical societal messages inflict on men, and all of us.
Dr Imogen Kearns
NHS clinical psychologist, London

• Ruth Ogden’s article is very insightful on the unsettling effect on humans of changing the clocks (Changing your clock? Scientists are only just beginning to understand what this does to us, 29 March). Our dog’s intriguing inner clock knows pee-times, tea-times, me-times and walkie-times. He thinks we get confused about this twice a year, but knows we are only human.
Rosalind Gillan
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire