What the U.K. Populist Surge Says About Politics Everywhere

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0:33Max Colchester:Another legal setback for President Trump's tariffs. Plus, a populist surge in Britain as Nigel Farage's Reform UK storms to a major win in local elections. What we're seeing here is a clear anti-incumbency shift, whether you're in the U.S. or Europe. If you're in power, you're unpopular. People feel that they are not as well off as they once were. And that is a problem that takes a lot of time and is very difficult to fix. and why some writers are ditching the perfectionism and polish honed over their careers. It's Friday, May 8th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

1:17Max Colchester:A federal trade court has invalidated President Trump's 10 percent global tariffs, which he'd imposed after his broader tariff strategy was struck down by the Supreme Court in February. In a two-to-one ruling, the Court of International Trade said that Trump failed to meet the criteria for imposing the 10 percent levies under powers meant to address persistent trade imbalances. Journal Legal Affairs reporter Lydia Wheeler said the ruling's immediate impact could be limited, as Trump had already been planning to replace the time-limited tariffs in July. Thursday's ruling on the Section 122 tariffs is significant, but it's important to note here that importers aren't going to get immediate relief from this decision.

1:56The court decided not to issue a universal injunction to block the levies from being imposed on everyone who's paid them. The court said only the two importers that challenged the levies and also the state of Washington must be repaid with interest. But other importers can now go to court and point to this decision and say, hey, I'm also owed a refund here because the court said that these tariffs are invalid.

2:21Max Colchester:That could add complexity to an already sprawling government effort to refund the more than$160 billion in collected tariffs that were invalidated by the Supreme Court. A White House spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration is expected to appeal the decision. Tensions are flaring again in the Middle East this morning after the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire in the Persian Gulf yesterday. The U.S. military says that Iran launched a series of attacks Thursday on American warships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, leading it to strike a number of military sites in response.

2:56Max Colchester:While President Trump has downplayed the Iranian attacks as a trifle and said that a ceasefire remains in effect, fresh attacks on the United Arab Emirates today could test that assessment.

3:10Max Colchester:British voters have voiced their displeasure with Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer handing Nigel Farage's Reform UK party a major win in local elections. As we heard in conversations with voters in London, Starmer, who had set out to prove that pragmatism could hold off a populist tide, faced pressure from both the right and left. Reform, because I'm fed up with the way the country's run. I just want Starmer out and I want the people to think of us. like British citizens. I do just feel that they're not left-wing enough. I think, unfortunately, under Keir Starmer, they've become really quite a right-wing party, and there's a lot of stuff which they say and do which I disagree with.

3:49Yeah, I've always been a Labour voter, this time reform, because his promise is Daniel Pan. He hasn't kept to none of his manifestos. So, no, I've lost all confidence in Labour Party. And that's it, basically. So I voted Green today. First time, actually.

4:06Max Colchester:I'm not saying Greens are perfect, but I think they just have a bit more of a pulse of what really matters to people. Max Colchester is the Journal's UK correspondent. Max, for the benefit of our international audience, these weren't national elections. And Starmer, who secured a massive election victory for the centre-left Labour Party back in 2024, ending, we should say, 14 years of Conservative control, still has a very big majority in Parliament. And yet the vibe today is that his mandate is now massively eroded. Explain that. Yes, what we're seeing here is a series of local elections. And these are normally fairly mundane affairs where people select local councillors who deal with things like potholes and trash collection.

4:49But what this has turned into is a litmus test of Starmer and the Labour Party's popularity with the British public. And the message that we're seeing loud and clear is that people are fed up with him. Now, Labour's problem is that the Labour Party vote is fracturing. Those on the left of the Labour Party are voting for the Green Party. Those on the right of the party, the working class, are voting for the Reform Party, the Anti-Immigration Populist Party. And it seems like Starmer's base is eroding very rapidly.

5:19Max Colchester:We spoke to at least one person who tried to make the case, hey, give this guy a bit more time. Let's hear from them. It wouldn't be right to desert Labour so early on, such an early stage. I think we need to give them a bit more of a chance on a national level. Max, I'm getting the impression that is a bit of an outlier in sentiment. But I will say also, don't the British tabloids, and isn't this sort of political culture one of always trying to call for a challenge to leadership? How serious is the threat to Starmer's prime ministership? Well, that's a good point. And you're right, the tabloids in the press here are very, very vicious and always eager to dethrone a prime minister.

5:52And it would be quite astounding if he did leave. We would then be on to our sixth prime minister in seven years in this country, which is really an extraordinary turnover. But I think what we're seeing from these local election results as they come in, and we have to be clear, they haven't yet all been counted and we don't have the full picture yet. I think we can see three things coming out of this. One, the anti-immigration party Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, which is really running on a message that Britain is broken and that we need to have an anti-establishment political order come in and shake things up and ditch the status quo.

6:24their message has resonated really very deeply, especially across post-industrial parts of the UK and among working class voters. The second thing is we're seeing that Keir Starmer really now is in a fight to secure his position in number 10 Downing Street. And there's already talk of whether he should be pressured by lawmakers into setting out an orderly transition for his departure. He's already come out and said he won't and that he's going to hang in there. But what we've seen in recent years in British politics is once that narrative takes hold, it's quite hard to shake. So it's definitely going to be a very bumpy ride for him in the next few months.

6:59And the last factor is we're seeing really the reordering of a political system here that has been in place for about a century, which was a duopoly, which was the Conservatives and Labour controlling British politics. And we're seeing that fraying. We're seeing a bunch of populist parties on the left and the right making inroads into the electorate. And we're seeing a fracturing of that political order. And I think that's really what's going to make the weather here in the longer term.

7:25Max Colchester:Though probably of greatest interest to listeners abroad is which of the dynamics you just pointed to is most relevant to them? And we look forward to midterm elections in the US this year. Is it a global right-wing populist wave or is this just anti-incumbency based on the cost of living, just frustration that persistent challenges just aren't being addressed by whoever's in office? Well, we're definitely seeing a trend of anti-incumbency. I think voters are frustrated that change isn't happening fast enough. And we're in an era, especially in Europe, of low growth. So it's very hard for politicians to come in and actually affect change without difficult trade-offs, which are actually quite hard to sell to the general public.

8:04So that's definitely one factor we're seeing. And it is extraordinary that people in power become so unpopular so quickly as people become more polarized and more willing to switch between parties or rebel against incumbents. And that does have serious consequences. It raises questions about how you do actually govern countries if you have six months to a year to actually do something. and often it takes years to turn around and solve problems. So that is a broader question and Keir Starmer definitely looks likely to become a victim of that trend.

8:34Max Colchester:Max Colchester is The Journal's UK correspondent. Max, as always, thanks so much. Thank you very much.

8:42Max Colchester:In markets news, the owner of British Airways, IAG, is forecasting that higher fuel costs will dent its full-year profits, even as travel demand remains strong. That forecast comes as new data shows that U.S. airlines saw a 56 percent jump in their fuel bills for March. Meanwhile, Toyota is warning that the Iran war will drag its profits by more than$4 billion, while 15 percent U.S. tariffs do more than double that damage. Toyota shares are down 11 percent this year through Thursday. And Coinbase Global has swung to a loss as a weak crypto market dragged down the exchange's top line. Earlier this week, the company cut 14 % of staff, with its CEO pointing to a broader down market for crypto, as Bitcoin and other major tokens struggle to reclaim last year's highs.

9:30Max Colchester:And a heads up that we've got a special bonus episode coming later today. In the latest What's News in Earnings, we'll be looking at the high-stakes race to win the weight loss pill market. That'll be right here in your What's News feed at midday. We will be right back after a quick break. The real challenge of AI isn't the pilot. It's what happens when organizations try to scale it across the enterprise and things start to break. In a new episode of Tech Fluential, Cisco's Liz Santoni and former Humana CIO and Capital One executive Sam Deshpande explore why AI needs a total redesign of how work gets done.

10:05They share how to move from experiment to transformation and build a culture that's ready for the challenge. Where technology and influence converge, new opportunities can emerge. That's Tech Fluential, a podcast from Deloitte and custom content from WSJ.

10:21Max Colchester:We are learning more about the Trump administration's response to the emergence of powerful new AI tools. As we mentioned earlier in the week, that includes Anthropics, Mythos, and others capable of finding software vulnerabilities on their own, which has sparked alarm within the White House. According to Journal reporter Amrith Ramkumar, Vice President J.D. Vance held a call last month where he told top tech CEOs that they might have to get used to more federal oversight, exactly what the industry had lobbied against. He was worried that that capability could really inflict damage on small-town community banks, water plants, and hospitals.

10:56He told a group of tech CEOs that basically they needed to work with the federal government and the Trump administration hand-in-hand to make sure that everyone was protected, especially those that don't have the resources to bolster their cyber defenses. It was a remarkable moment in that Vice President Vance was on the call and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on the call, two potential frontrunners for the 2020 Republican nomination. You also had five of the nation's top tech CEOs on the same call, Sam Altman from OpenAI, Dario Amadei from Anthropic, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Satya Nadella for Microsoft.

11:33That group rarely gets together, and the fact that they all were on this call to talk about mythos shows how important that moment was for the White House and for the tech industry at large.

11:43Max Colchester:Since the call, administration officials have said they are balancing proper oversight and innovation. Still, there's concerned talk about the government getting involved in the rollout of AI models, a shift away from the administration's previous hands-off approach. In recent days, Kevin Hassett, a top economic official in the administration, compared the White House's potential approach in an upcoming executive order to the process used by the FDA to approve new drugs. That comment sparked widespread alarm from allies and opponents of the administration who said that approach would not work for a technology like AI that is growing rapidly.

12:20Some administration officials we spoke to cautioned that they're still committed to their industry-friendly approach with limited guardrails. And this is just about managing the cyber risk.

12:29Max Colchester:A White House official said that any discussion about executive orders is speculation unless announced by President Trump. And finally, it's not just the administration trying to handle the impacts of AI. With AI-generated writing flooding the internet from quippy LinkedIn posts to insightful sub-stacks, reporter Tepeng Chen says that readers are increasingly trying to spot what's AI, and prompting writers to try and master a skill that they'd never previously questioned, how to ensure that their work sounds authentically human. Some of the things people are doing, inserting maybe deliberate typos to make it seem more authentic, not as many sort of short, punchy, staccato-like sentence breaks, trying to do more things like even inject references to maybe obscure moments from sitcoms like The Office to make themselves sound more human.

13:21Max Colchester:But as T 'Ping explains, even for a human, sounding more human can be tricky. It is getting harder to tell when something is AI written. That's partly because AI, the writing is improving. And also, one aspect is that people are increasingly kind of absorbing this AI style of writing and voice. And so some of the people I spoke to said that they don't necessarily use AI, but they find themselves sort of emulating its tics. A number of people I spoke to likened it to sort of this new McCarthyism and wishing that they could just write like themselves, even if sometimes that self does sound maybe a little bit more like AI, because AI, of course, learn from a lot of good writing out there.

14:02Max Colchester:And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Something I'm jazzed about, because what does a workaholic AI know about the joy of weekends? Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.

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