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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21633 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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The UK and US have announced a trade deal.

Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):

  • US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
  • Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
  • British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
  • UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
  • Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
  • The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
  • The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
  • Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).

Initial thoughts:

  • This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
  • This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
  • This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
  • The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
  • The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.

Thoughts on the politics:

  • The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
  • Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
  • Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
  • The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
  • The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
  • Farage hasn't spoken yet.

The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.

Just looked it up, I've been on a Scotch kick lately and I'm not eager about more price increases- there's a 25% tariff Trump instated his first term, but was suspended for five years in 2021. Supposedly the industry lost 600 million pounds during the time they were in effect.

I think this one was always going to stick because Trump doesn't like booze. Annoying, but here we are.

Scotch is also the blue-coded whisky; Bourbon and Rye are the red tribe hard liquors of choice.

What's maximally red-coded? Probably Jack Daniels?

I feel like an upscale liquor shelf kind of supersedes the tribes. I would be equally unsurprised to see BTAC bottles at a car dealer's home in the suburbs as an academic's bungalow in the city.

I would say that any top-shelf alcohol* is weakly Blue-coded as part of the general pattern that allegedly refined taste = Blue, moar and bigger = Red.

I have never come across Bourbon - for whatever reason it doesn't get exported. The whisky market has this odd dynamic where most countries make whisky, many countries make expensive whisky (including Bourbon in the US), but about 95% of whisky consumed outside the country of origin is Scotch.

* Except Cognac, which is Black-coded in the US for reasons which are completely opaque to non-Americans.

Except Cognac, which is Black-coded in the US for reasons which are completely opaque to non-Americans.

Alright, I'll bite: this is the first I'm hearing of that, please do go on.

Cognac brands for reasons mostly unknown or lost to time were some of the first high end brands to advertise to African American customers back in the Jim Crow days. Some historians vaguely posit a further history in the world wars, or French companies willing to ignore American racial codes and advertise to an underserved demographic; but for the most part it's probably just a random event that black consumers saw black models advertising cognac in Ebony and Jet decades before Johnny Walker would think of advertising to the negro market, and developed a taste for the product.

From there it's just become a cultural meme, and high end cognac partakes of the general phenomenon of Nigger Rich, where flaunting displays of wealth and luxury are common status symbols. Of course that itself has roots in segregation: upwardly mobile 20th century American blacks couldn't buy a house in a rich neighborhood or send their kids to a ritzy private school or travel to a fancy resort, but they could buy a Cadillac or a bottle of Hennessy.

American whites largely ignored cognac prior as it seemed a little too effete and aristocratic for the Great Male Renunciation era; the only American white men I can remember drinking cognac in media are Frasier and Niles Crane. After the rise of Hennessy et al as hip hop icons, cognac became too black for most white men, as it drifted too close to wiggerdom to be a white guy drinking Henny, similar to how I inherited a Louis Vuitton monogram briefcase from an uncle and thought "Wow I'd look like a poseur carrying this stupid thing."

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