‘Europe won't be blackmailed'
Mette Frederiksen, Danish Prime Minister
I'm not surprised to hear that Mark Carney has set off for a meeting with Xi Jinping in China: perhaps he read our commentary of a fortnight ago. When you see Donald Trump using whatever bullying tactics he can lay his hands on in order to dominate his ‘hemisphere’, and then you consider what Canadians must feel about having Trump to their South, Trump to their North-West, and now the threat of Trump to their North-East — well, it really does point to the need to draw autocratic empires to a close.
The indiscriminate application of tariffs on anyone who dares support Greenland and Denmark is just ridiculous. The only way to respond is to give Trump back some of his own medicine: tariffs on American tech, to the same extent as his 10%—25% proposals for Europe and the United Kingdom. We all recall how he was surrounded by tech leaders at his inauguration, and I suspect it would not take long for them to pressure him to change tack. Oh —and at the same time, let's apply a targeted tax on American-owned golf properties in South Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire.
Having listened carefully to Keir Starmer’s speech on 19th January, it’s clear that he thinks the answer to ‘shoot first, ask questions afterwards’ is just to ask questions. But if you’re not clear about what is your backstop, that s likely to be construed as just soft waffle.
The problem is that, as he gets older, Donald Trump just continues to hark back to his property-bullying days — the worrying thing is that we all have to put up with three more years of this, as I doubt he will pay any attention to a poor showing in the mid-term elections.
ID verification — should be sufficient & global, not excessive & national
''When a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.’
Robert A. Heinlein
Until driven off-course by Trump's attempt to blackmail Europe over Greenland, our plan was to comment this week on the need to apply a bit more sense to the vexed question of ID verification. The rest of this commentary, therefore, will focus on the latest U-turn from Sir Keir Starmer, and on what should be the real need for ID verification: individual empowerment, rather than individual restriction.
The whole plan for mandatory ID verification was based on a desire to restrict people: trying to stop migrants from being able to find jobs. It is, however, absolutely necessary for migrants to be able to find employment, not only for their own sakes but also due to the collapsing birth rates for native British people. An article in The Guardian last week graphically described the French challenge in this respect, and the situation in the United Kingdom is very similar.
However, anyone who has tried to get digital ID verification, which is now required for all company directors when their annual Confirmation Statement is submitted to Companies House, will know what a ridiculous process it is. After struggling for nearly two hours with the process, I can fully understand why Sir Keir Starmer was advised to drop mandatory completion for the population as a whole.
The real challenge for ID verification is not national but global. Individual empowerment, especially for disadvantaged young people, is a key part of delivering a more egalitarian approach to economic life: particularly for inter-generational rebalancing. It means delivering starter capital accounts and life skills for individual ownership — but in order to do this, the issuing authorities need to know that they are reaching the correct young people. This requires verification of their identity.
In the United Kingdom, we already have a good system of National Insurance numbers; and in other developed countries such as the United States, similar systems are in place. If this were not the case, it wouldn’t be possible for initiatives such as Michael Dell's amazing philanthropy in funding starter capital accounts to be put in place in the USA.
The problem is that in so many countries these ID systems are not in place. During the pandemic, these countries had to rely on Demographic and Health Surveys to establish what their situation was. We need something much more accurate than this in order to provide individual empowerment for the huge numbers of disadvantaged young people in these countries.
So, instead of Donald Trump spending his time on bullying tactics to preserve and extend his fiefdom, let's hope that he gradually comes to realise that a global perspective is what's needed in real statesmen of the future.
The United States has so much to offer to the world, but it needs to understand that its population makes up less than 5% of humanity. Rather than barricading its ‘Fortress America’ walls, it should join with those of us who are trying to find a better place in which everyone can co-exist.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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