Planlessness (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World. By Philip Coggan. Profile £7.99.

A first reaction to this book is that it was likely to be out of date by the time it was published. Given Trump’s tendency to change his mind, anything said would probably no longer apply after a month or two. The author does indeed record Trump’s decisions about tariffs and his repeated revisions of them, describing him as ‘a man without a plan’ who based the calculation of tariff rates on an absurd formula. But he also notes some ideas that underlie Trump’s policies.

The main reason seems to be the intention to return manufacturing industries (and jobs) to the US, but this is unlikely to be successful. In 2013, as an illustration, Motorola opened a smartphone factory in Texas, but it closed after a year because of high costs. Even when it does pay off, building new factories takes time and the US has a shortage of factory workers; they might come from abroad, but of course Trump is clamping down on immigration. The US will simply not re-enter ‘a golden age of manufacturing employment’.

On the whole Coggan adopts an orthodox economic perspective, arguing, for example, that tariffs interfere with market signals about the causes of rising and falling prices. Tariffs have varied over the centuries and protectionism was more widespread between the two world wars. But since the 1960s tariffs have generally been falling, from a global average of 14 percent then to 10.9 per cent in 2000 and 2.5 per cent in 2021. Free trade, he says, is good for an economy, though there has rarely been completely free trade.

One good point he makes is about the interconnectedness of global production, with long and complex supply chains. An iPhone is based on 187 suppliers across twenty-eight countries, while cars imported to the US from Mexico consist largely of components made in the US. Around eighty per cent of the toys sold in US shops are made in China, so the massive tariffs Trump wanted to impose on imports from China were a non-starter, and they have now been scaled back in a major way. American workers are already complaining about higher food prices as a result of the various tariffs, such as bread doubling in price (Guardian 19 October).

The whole world, Coggan suggests at the end of this short volume, ‘will suffer the adverse economic consequences of Mr Trump’. But really these are the consequences of the capitalist system, not the result of the idiosyncrasies of one man.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Warming up (2026)

The Action Replay column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The UN has a programme called Sports for Climate Action, described as ‘a global movement harnessing the unifying power of sport to address climate change and build a more sustainable and resilient future’ (unfccc.int). Sport can be adversely affected by climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, but supposedly it can also be an agent for promoting collective action. Sport, it is claimed, needs to adapt to the impacts of global warming and also to engage its global audience to make their own contribution to fighting climate change.

All very well, of course, but a look at some of the environmental impact of professional sport paints a rather different picture. In motor racing, Formula 1 (F1) will be moving from the use of fossil fuels to an allegedly sustainable fuel from next season, fuel which might then be used in ordinary cars. But, as noted in the November 2025 Science Focus, there are major issues involved here. The new fuels may be low in carbon emissions but still emit many other pollutants, hence not really being sustainable. The synthetic fuels may in fact involve CO2 emissions in the process of producing hydrogen from natural gas, so the overall climate impact is not at all clear. In any case, fuel from races is only a tiny part of F1’s total carbon footprint, with massive amounts of global travel playing a far larger part. Carbon emissions in the logistics side of F1 have already been reduced, but there is still a long way to go to achieve real sustainability.

Another example would be this year’s football World Cup, which will be played in the US, Canada and Mexico, in stadiums from Vancouver to Mexico City, so meaning much long-distance travel. It will involve 48 teams and 104 matches (sixteen more teams and forty more games than previous tournaments). Scotland, for instance, will play their group matches in Boston and Miami, which are well over a thousand miles apart. One estimate is that the tournament will generate over nine million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, almost double what previous ones have produced.

In addition, the heat will mean that many of the venues will be effectively unplayable during the afternoon. Many top players have already suffered while playing in hot conditions in the US, as in last year’s Club World Cup, and also there will be hundreds of thousands of supporters, plus backroom staff and media workers who will have to endure extreme heat at many matches, reaching over thirty degrees or perhaps even forty. FIFA are apparently keeping ‘an open mind’ on all this, which presumably means they won’t be making any significant decisions quite yet, if at all.

So global warming can affect not just people’s living conditions, but various kinds of leisure activity too. And sport can exacerbate climate change, as well as (just possibly) help to combat it.

Paul Bennett

Party News – YP conference (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

YP- Labour 2.0?

Just to demonstrate our northern hardiness, members went out in uninviting November weather to Manchester and Liverpool to dish out 500 leaflets on the occasion of the first national conference of Your Party (now its official moniker). Previously, other members had done likewise at YP events in Huddersfield, Bolton, Preston, Stroud, Swansea, Cardiff, Newport, Brighton, Oxford, Gillingham, and London (all compass points).

The Liverpool conference was hastily convened to thrash out questions like its name, its constitution, its aims, and in particular who was going to be in charge of it. All this amid breathless drama after Corbyn’s faction summarily expelled Trot entryists from the SWP, on the (actually incorrect) argument that they were registered as a different party with the Electoral Commission and therefore ineligible for membership. At this, Zarah Sultana promptly boycotted the first day of the meeting, which does not bode well for the future of YP but must have tickled Zack Polanski, the Greens’ new ‘socialist’ snake-oil salesman, who is seeing a significant bump in membership as a result of these antics.

Our leaflet was called ‘YP – Labour 2.0?’ and argued that even if Your Party was ever able to form a government, it would inevitably suffer the same fate as the original Labour Party, meaning that YP would not change capitalism, capitalism would change YP. It’s quite possibly no coincidence that we handed Zarah Sultana a leaflet in person, after which a YouTube video appeared in which she specifically denied that Your Party would turn into Labour 2.0.

One resentful but revealing comment heard from a conference participant was ‘SPGB? Oh yes. None of us are ever good enough, are we?’ This must have been a reference to our so-called ‘purist’ reputation among the left, in contrast to their customary ‘pragmatic’ approach. But we’re not purist, just principled. We’ve been telling the left for generations not to keep doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, but they keep doing it, and now they’re doing it again with Your Party – trying to reform capitalism into something that works for humanity instead of against it. It drives them mad when we tell them that they’re wasting their time trying to fix the unfixable. It must drive them madder still that we’re always somehow proved right when their strenuous efforts fall apart. We wish it wasn’t so, but it will continue to be so until the left, and workers in general, acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that capitalism needs to be abolished, and replaced with a democratic system of free access for all and collective ownership and control of the Earth’s resources.

PJS

SPGB January Events (2026)

Party News from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.