exports to Europe and slumping EU sales to China. A stream of visiting European leaders have warned Mr Xi that China’s state-backed manufacturing juggernaut poses an intolerable threat to industries in their home countries. Unless China changes course, Europe too will have to close itself off, is their co-ordinated message. So far, China’s reaction involves more cynicism than fear. Party high-ups are connoisseurs of power and coercion. That is how they become party bosses (at least until the next purge). It is why they respect and resent America, the one country with the financial, technological and military might to slow China’s rise. By contrast, they see Europe as an economic giant with puny geopolitical leverage, hobbled by its need for consensus among 27 members. On a visit to Beijing and Shanghai, this columnist heard Europe discussed with scorn. A senior figure described Chinese leaders as exasperated by decades of European lectures about values, most recently over China’s support for Russia over Ukraine. What about Mr Trump’s contempt for values, Chinese bigwigs ask? Europe is missing a chance to embrace China as a partner. Updating their divide-and-rule formula, Chinese officials and trade negotiators heap praise on selected national governments. (Spain is a current favourite.) National leaders are called refreshingly pragmatic by focusing on attracting Chinese high-tech investments. Conversely, EU officials in Brussels are scolded for being ideological and obsessed with achieving perfect economic security. Europeans should be realists as they negotiate, as Americans now are, is a frequent Chinese line of attack. Brussels policy chiefs are not ready to back down. Fears of a looming China shock are leading EU officials to prepare stronger trade defences, including the more frequent use of safeguard measures involving high tariffs to shield whole industries. A get-tough package is set for debate by the European Commission, the EU’s executive, this month and by national leaders in June. The Industrial Accelerator Act, a draft law, would oblige foreign investors with dominant positions in batteries, electric cars and other strategic industries (hello, China) to hire more European workers, buy lots of locally made components and transfer technologies to European partners as the
price of access to the EU market. Another proposal would add buy-European conditions to big public contracts. The EU has moved to tighten customs rules on low-value imports, after Europe’s online-shopping addicts ordered almost 6bn small packages last year, mainly from China. Chinese officials and industrialists recognise a copy when they see one. They know that European proposals aim to reproduce technological and value-extraction techniques that China used with success on Western multinationals a generation ago. Instead of finding this imitation flattering, Chinese high-ups deride Europeans as lazy and chronically unwilling to invest in innovation. China’s commerce ministry last month threatened unspecified countermeasures if the Industrial Accelerator Act becomes law. A Chinese business executive asks why Europeans suppose that his country’s high-tech investments might create lots of jobs. Recalling a European factory visit, he describes seeing photographs of long-serving employees proudly hung on a wall. In our plants, those pictures would show a line of robots, he scoffs. It is a sharp joke, but bad politics. If China is blamed for destroying European steel or carmaking jobs, say, any German chancellor or French president will face demands to intervene. Maros Sefcovic, an EU commissioner from Slovakia who now holds the trade portfolio—making him the chief trade negotiator for 27 countries—is dubbed an unflappable Mr Fixit in Brussels. Still, in an interview for Inside Geopolitics, a video show produced by The Economist, he is blunt. He compares Europe’s dependency on rare earths and other critical minerals from China to its former reliance on Russian energy. Then there are surging exports driven by Chinese industrial overcapacity. If the EU does not defend itself and China fails to rebalance its economy, he avers, Europe risks losing “whole sectors of industry within a couple of years”. Against that, he has a mandate to avoid costly fights. “Not a single” business leader is urging him to start trade conflicts, he says. “It’s very easy to start a trade war, but it’s difficult to stop one.” Even interventionists seek to pick their battles. Stéphane Séjourné is France’s EU commissioner, holding the “prosperity and industrial-strategy” portfolio. He advocates industrial policies and buy-European clauses. He
worries about the security implications of Chinese-made electric cars and green technologies. But rather than slow Europe’s low-carbon transition, he wants to focus on components that a hostile power could use for ill: the inverters that connect solar panels to electricity grids, or the interface through which an autonomous car talks to its manufacturer. Europe dreads a trade war with China. It also fears losing its industries. Only tough choices await. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//europe/2026/05/12/the-eu-and-china-are-stumbling-into-a- trade-war
Who can save the Labour Party? How Tommy Robinson, far-right influencer, shaped views on Britain Anatomy of a coup against Keir Bond-market lessons for Labour’s leadership hopefuls Labour has turned into the Conservative Party
Who can save the Labour Party? Britain’s social democrats are down but not out May 14th 2026 “My grandad grew up a miner’s son,” said Alan Strickland, a Labour MP, in a campaign video before the 2024 general election. The mind-twisting line is meaningless but as a wannabe Labour candidate his hat tip (or flat-cap tip) to working-class history was de rigueur. Never mind that the last colliery in Mr Strickland’s patch was 30 years ago. The Labour Party is steeped in sentimentality. On May 7th Sir Keir Starmer’s centre-left party was trounced in local and devolved elections. Its losses were particularly heavy in historical heartlands in the north of England, West Midlands and Wales. Along with the political cost, Labour MPs suffered the emotional toll of seeing their party reduced to dust in areas it had held for more than a century. In the aftermath, nearly 100
of them publicly called for Sir Keir to resign, including four government ministers. Even if the prime minister limps on for months, few believe he will lead Labour into the next election. Despite the gloom, his successor still has a good chance of winning over the country. The drubbing had long been expected. Labour has sunk around 20 percentage points in polls since 2022, when most of the council seats were last contested. But expectation management did little to ease the shock as results trickled in. The party lost 58% of its councillors up for election in England. It lost Barnsley and Sunderland, two northern strongholds, for the first time since those councils were established in 1974. In Wales it fell from a century-long winning streak to third place, with just nine seats in the country’s 96-member devolved parliament, the Senedd. The party went backwards in Scotland—another former heartland—just two years after soundly defeating the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the general election. As the electorate has fragmented and opinion of the government soured, voters have abandoned the party in all directions. According to polling by More in Common around 14% of those who voted Labour in 2024 now say they would vote for the populist-left Green Party, 11% for the populist-right Reform UK, 8% Liberal Democrat and 5% Conservative. This played out on May 7th, when Labour lost seats on all fronts. In council elections between 2021 and 2024 the party won areas with a majority of younger or working- class voters (see chart 1). This year Reform and the Greens acted like a pincer: Reform took older, working-class areas while the Greens won younger, urban ones. Reform was the resounding winner of the local elections. The party gained more than 1,450 councillors and control of 14 councils (slowed only by the fact that many of them elected merely a third of their councillors this year). Nigel Farage’s party defeated Labour in northern councils and ravaged the Tories in their rural county councils. The party won majorities in Essex and Suffolk and became the largest in Norfolk and East Sussex. Even so, this was not a landslide. Political scientists estimate that if the local elections were held nationwide, Reform would win 26-27% of the vote— down from 30-31% last year (see chart 2). Indeed, the party fell short in its own terms. Earlier this year Mr Farage said the locals were an opportunity to
destroy the Conservative Party. Instead, the Tory share of the vote rose compared with last year. Reform fell short in three of the four London boroughs it was targeting and was defeated in Wales, which Mr Farage previously called “Reform’s top priority”. The Green Party also made big gains. It won its first elected mayors in the vibrant inner-London boroughs of Hackney and Lewisham and took dozens of seats off Labour in student-y city centres in Leeds, Manchester, Norwich, Oxford and Sheffield. The Greens are now the largest party in five of London’s 32 boroughs (see map). The results reveal little not already known from opinion polls, but the reality of losing this many seats has spurred jittery Labour MPs into action. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, is said to be collecting names to nominate him and trigger a leadership election. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and another potential contender, claims to have a seat in Parliament ready for his return. The risk is that the contest to succeed Sir Keir becomes a race to the bottom, spurred by the party’s left-wing membership and misguided sentimentalism about its historical heartlands. Angela Rayner, another potential challenger and former deputy leader, on May 10th issued a statement calling on the party to double down on left-wing policies: raising the minimum wage, extending workers’ rights and soaking the rich. The Tribune group of soft- left MPs published a pamphlet calling for wealth taxes and increased borrowing. In reality Labour has not been rewarded for its left-wing initiatives. Abolishing the two-child limit on benefits was the right thing to do but there is no evidence that this or continuing to raise the minimum wage has helped Labour among low-income voters, who are leaving the party faster than high earners. The government’s Renters’ Rights Act has not stopped private renters switching to the Greens. Expansive workers’ rights legislation has not prevented unions from mulling disaffiliation. And the government’s recognition of Palestine has not swayed those who believe it is aiding a genocide.