The weekend’s headlines have continued to be dominated by Trump, trade wars and tariffs, as well as the ongoing battle between retailers and the chancellor as businesses look to minimise the potentially catastrophic effects of last October’s budget.
In what could be considered a predictable piece of international tit-for-tat, the UK is looking imposing at tariffs on US products if steel and aluminium get caught in the impending trade war, reported the Financial Times.
The threat of the hefty 25% import taxes on British steel and aluminium, saw business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds warning that we could see a return to UK tariffs being imposed on US products including whiskey, jeans and motorbikes.
Separately, PM Keir Starmer has said he is hoping to be able to build a British ‘bridge’ between Donald Trump and Europe, as transatlantic tensions over Ukraine, defence, trade and free speech continue to worsen.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has rebuffed M&S’s call for National Insurance ‘breathing space’ as retailers continue to protest against the impact of last October’s budget. CEO Stuart Machin has been a vocal voice among a number of retail leaders who have been lobbying Reeves over the impact of implementing the new measures.
Last week, Machin called for the chancellor to gradually lower the National Insurance threshold over a two-year period, a move which he said would give retailers “breathing space” as they also prepared to introduce the increase in the National Living Wage and other tax increases.
The blows keep coming for Reeves, as The Guardian this morning revealed that UK employers are preparing for the biggest round of redundancies in the last 10 years, according to a survey of 2,000 employers from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
The collapse in business confidence comes as last week’s official figures showed Britain narrowly avoided a recession in the second half of 2024.
Unilever’s decision to choose Amsterdam over London for listing its ice-cream offshoot which includes household names Magnum and Ben & Jerry’s – as reported in The Grocer last week – came under fire in the Daily Mail’s This Is Money section, which described the move as a “snub” to both the chancellor and the city.
In what might be one of the more suprising headlines of the weekend, the Post Office has renewed its £40m contract for the faulty Horizon IT software that has been the subject of much controversy over recent months. Despite the fact that at least 900 subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted for financial losses caused by faults in the accounting software, the Fujitsu contract has been renewed until March 2026.
The Post Office had previously said it would replace Horizon with “new branch technology”, following the fallout of what has been described as one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
Extreme weather events are expected to hit crop yields and cause further food price spikes this year after the cost of cocoa and coffee doubled over the past year, according to a report in The Guardian. The report appeared to confirm warnings that climate breakdown could lead to food shortages, with the highest price rises for cocoa and coffee (up 163% and 103% respectively).
Deliveroo has sacked more than 100 drivers in a crackdown on illegal migrants, reports The Telegraph. The food delivery giant has sacked employees who share rider accounts with undocumented workers as part of ongoing efforts to tackle illegal immigration within its workforce.
A less high-profile campaign has seen Waitrose pledging to stop selling suffocated farmed prawns by the end of next year, after an animal rights pressure group petitioned the retailer, arguing that the underwater creatures feel pain. The change, which will apply to all of Waitrose’s farmed prawns, will mean suppliers are required to use electrical stunning on all farmed shrimp and prawns instead.
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