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April 11, 2025 • Twitter.com/easterneye
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ASIAN communities are known for
their strong family links – mostly this
is seen as an advantage, but a recent
report has shown how preconceived
notions can pose difficulties.
A survey last month by the nation-
al charity Kinship and Rees Centre at
the University of Oxford outlined the
experiences of black and Asian kin-
ship carers who said they felt aban-
doned by the system as their requests
for help went unheeded.
A lack of understanding of cultural
nuances by authorities meant such
families were unable to access sup-
port even when it was available.
One mixed-race kinship carer
spoke of his struggles to answer his
white niece’s questions on identity
and skin colour differences.
Another (Asian) participant re-
called how a white social worker
commented on their ‘nice house’.
Children’s Services were blamed
for assuming that large families meant
stable and enduring networks, leaving
carers having to explain that fragile
relationships could break down,
which has an impact on both young
children and the kinship carers.
Campaigners who call for the
adoption and pursuit of diversity
across all sectors understand why
this is important. Having someone
who understands – without the need
for a lengthy explanation about the
whys and hows – can be an invalua-
ble experience for kinship carers.
More should be done to raise
awareness of the gaps in access to
such services so that everyone has
the vital support they need to raise
children in a stable, nurturing and
loving environment.
Kinship carer concerns
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’
by SUNDER KATWALA
Director, British Future
GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 was the
most influential novel of the 20th
century.
It was intended as a dystopian war-
ning, though I have an uneasy feeling
that its depiction of a world split into
three great power blocs – Oceania,
Eurasia and Eastasia – may increas-
ingly now be seen in US president
Donald Trump’s White House, Russi-
an president Vladimir Putin’s Krem-
lin or China president Xi Jingping’s
Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing
more as some kind of training manu-
al or world map to aspire to instead.
Orwell was writing in 1948, when
1984 seemed a distantly futuristic
date that he would make legendary.
Yet, four more decades have taken us
now further beyond 1984 than Orwell
was ahead of it.
The tariff trade wars unleashed
from the White House last week make
it more likely that future historians will
now identify the 2024 return of Trump
to the White House as finally calling
the post-war world order to an end.
The great power conflict which Or-
well imagined differs from our emer-
ging world disorder. As the cold war
alliances of his era took shape, Orwell
put America, Russia and China in ri-
val blocs. So Orwell had “Eurasia”
stretching from Russia across all of
Europe, though Stalin’s successors
only went on to control the eastern
half of the continent in the decades to
1989. Orwell’s London was no longer
a national capital. Britain was simply
“Airstrip One” to signal its subservi-
ence within the English-speaking
world that Orwell labels “Oceania”.
Yet the Trump-Putin axis is key to
Washington’s rejection of the
core assumptions of western
security and economic policy.
So what is Trump up to?
Almost every economist has
explained the irrationality of
his tariffs – if they are consid-
ered in economic terms. The
theory of comparative advan-
tage explains why trade can be
of mutual benefit.
But Trump is a zero-sum think-
er for whom there must always
be a winner and a loser. So
these were not so-called
“reciprocal tariffs”, where
the US might emulate the tariffs that it
faces, as a bargaining chip to try to
negotiate them away. Instead, a crude
blanket global formula reflected the
Trump trade doctrine that any coun-
try managing to export more to Amer-
ica than it imports must be “cheating”
at trade – and that the optimum trade
balance with every country, however
rich or poor, is zero. A president who
campaigned on lowering inflation
will hike up prices for Americans – on
the false prospectus that it is foreign
countries who pay for tariffs.
Trump’s tariffs are ultimately about
political power, not economics. His
protectionism is the power play of the
protection racket. The invisible
hand of the market is
replaced by the pre-
sidential power to
grant favoured ac cess
to countries abroad,
or sectors and insti-
tutions at home,
prepared to pledge
loyalty and offer fe-
alty to Trump.
Modi’s India
may be Washington’s top target for
showing that there are still deals to be
done. Smaller developing countries,
like Bangladesh, which faces a 37 per
cent tariff, will be hit hard, as sky-high
tariffs follow deep cuts in develop-
ment aid too.
Britain has often been cast satiri-
cally as America’s 51st state – though
Trump now pushes that label on a
deeply unwilling Canada. His likely
reward there looks set to be the back-
lash of an anti-Trump landslide in
this month’s Canadian election. Seek-
ing a mandate on the campaign trail,
the new prime minister, Mark Carney,
has been the leader to speak most
clearly about how much has changed.
British prime minister Sir Keir
Starmer and opposition Conservative
leader Kemi Badenoch sound much
less sure about how to respond. Both
declare that this is the end of an era –
and it will be important to keep calm
and strike a sensible trade deal with
Trump. Starmer hopes to reset the
UK-EU relationship too.
The genius of Orwell’s fictional de-
piction of a post-truth world was its
insistence on always aligning the past
with the present. When allies and en-
emies change sides, enormous effort
goes into rewriting newspaper archi-
ves. In reality, adapting to founda-
tional shifts is much harder to come
to terms with.
America has been a partner for
Britain and Europe for decades in se-
curity, trade and multilateral institu-
tions. But the Trump administration
is not merely retreating into isolation.
Its disdain for NATO, appetite for
trade wars and social media attacks
on erstwhile allies go much further.
Leaders and the public alike lack a
mental map or language for an unfa-
miliar world in which an American
government appears to present a new
threat from the West to our peace,
prosperity and democracy.
Despite the dystopian fears of 1984,
the post-war era in which Orwell
wrote was a time of hope, too. The
constructive creativity of that age
shaped peace and prosperity in its
time. Avoiding the nightmare scenar-
ios today may depend on how far
democratic leaders can somehow re-
vive that spirit.
‘Trump’s new world order
recalls Orwellian dystopia’
LONG before Donald Trump’s
“Liberation Day” announce-
ment, the United States had
toyed with imposing high tariffs
throughout its history, with in-
conclusive – and sometimes cat-
astrophic – results.
“We have a 20th-century pres-
ident in a 21st-century economy
who wants to take us back to the
19th century,” Dartmouth Col-
lege economics professor Doug-
las Irwin posted on X.
The 19th century marked the
golden age of tariffs in the US,
with an average rate regularly
flirting with 50 per cent.
The century extended a doc-
trine adopted since the country’s
founding, which advocated for
the protection of the American
economy as it underwent a peri-
od of industrialisation.
“Careful studies of that period
suggest that the tariffs did help
protect domestic development of
industry to some degree,” said
Keith Maskus, a professor at the
University of Colorado. “But the
two more important factors were
access to international labor, and
capital... which was flowing in the
United States during that period.”
Christopher Meissner, a pro-
fessor at the University of Cali-
fornia, Davis, said in addition to
these factors, “the reason we had
a thriving industrial sector in the
United States was we had great
access to natural resources.”
These resources included
coal, oil, iron ore, copper and
timber – all of which were cru-
cial to industry.
Shortly after taking office in
January, Trump said: “We were
at our richest from 1870 to 1913.”
The 78-year-old Republican
often references former US presi-
dent William McKinley, who was
behind one of the country’s most
restrictive tariff laws passed in
1890. They did not prevent im-
ports from continuing to grow in
the years that followed, although
once customs duties were low-
ered in 1894, the amount of
goods the US purchased abroad
remained below previous peaks.
In 1929, Harvard professor
George Roorbach wrote: “Since
the end of the Civil War (1865),
during which the United States
has been under a protective sys-
tem almost, if not quite, without
interruption, our import trade
has enormously expanded.”
A year later, the nation tight-
ened the screws with tariffs
again, this time under Republi-
can president Herbert Hoover.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
of 1930 is best remembered “for
triggering a global trade war and
deepening the Great Depressi on”,
according to the Center for Stra-
tegic and International Studies.
“What generated the depres-
sion... was a lot of complicated
factors, but the tariff increase is
one of them,” said Maskus.
The end of the Second World
War marked the start of a new
era in trade, defined by the ratifi-
cation in 1947 by 23 countries –
including the US – of the GATT
free trade agreement. It created
conditions for the development
of international trade by imposing
more moderate customs duties.
The momentum was maintai-
ned by the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) be-
tween the US, Mexico and Cana-
da, which took effect in 1994.
Alongside NAFTA, free trade
in the US was further expanded
by the creation of the World
Trade Organization in 1995, and
a 2004 free trade agreement be-
tween the US and several Central
American countries.
During his first term in office,
Trump decided on new tariffs
against China, many of which
were maintained under his suc-
cessor, Joe Biden. But despite
these levies, the US trade deficit
with China continued to grow
until 2022, when Beijing was hit
by a brutal economic slowdown.
For Maskus, the tariffs did not
do much to prevent the growth
of imports from China. (AFP)
TARIFFS MORE ABOUT POLITICAL POWER THAN ECONOMICS, SAYS EXPERT
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
© Aaron Tam/AFP
via Getty Images
FRIGHTENING FUTURE? Donald Trump announcing
tariffs during what he called ‘Liberation Day’ at the
White House last Wednesday (2); (right) George
Orwell’s 1984; and (inset below) Sunder Katwala
High US levies ‘deepened the Great Depression and triggered trade wars’