Oliver Rhodes

I don’t know if anyone reads the National Bureau of Economic Research, but they really should – especially right now. Buried beneath the trade figures, an academic paper from 2022 explains why the coming trade war between the US and its economic partners is a hidden blessing. Pablo D. Fajgelbaum of the University of California and his co-researchers asked what effect the first US-China trade war had on the world economy.

That China and America are on a collision course is by now well-known, thanks to the hundreds of books on the topic, gilding the landing pages of global think-tanks. Graham Allison’s Destined for War remains the gold standard, at least for its provocation factor: China and America are destined for war as Britain and Germany were a century ago, he argues, because America fears being displaced.

The government has made the full extent of its ambitions clear in the King’s Speech, including major reforms to devolution and house building. Forty new pieces of legislation – nearly twice as many as in the last parliament – are being prepared in the opening days of Starmer’s government. Headline manifesto pledges, such as the scrapping of the VAT exemption for private schools, are included. So too is a proposed bill to remove voting rights entirely for hereditary peers in the House of Lords.