WHAT OTHERS SAY
A CRISIS BEYOND THE BORDER
For all his talk about a supposed national security crisis on the border with Mexico, President Donald Trump is ignoring the potential crisis the federal shutdown is creating elsewhere in the country. Trump has essentially taken nine federal departments and dozens of federal agencies hostage in an effort to coerce Congress into spending $5.7 billion on the bigger, longer border wall he promised on the campaign trail to build (supposedly at Mexico’s expense, but now on the US taxpayers’ tab). Vital government services and responsibilities are being sacriiced in the political standoff, and there’s no end in sight. In some cases, the shutdown is making communities less safe. The western United States has experienced a series of catastrophic ires in recent years, yet much of the prevention work needed to reduce the risk is on hold during the shutdown. Fireighter hiring and training is frozen, as are contracts for equipment and aircraft. The US Forest Service has suspended controlled burns of dead timber and dry brush, steps that are designed to reduce the fuel and intensity of future wildires. This is all essential work that can be done only during the increasingly short off-season, and stopping those efforts leaves both ireighting agencies and wildland communities less prepared.
Los Angeles Times
BREACH OF TRUST
With a degree of understatement, the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, tells us that he has come to Downing Street because “I want to properly convey Japan’s thinking”. We should be grateful to him for doing so. Usually reticent and unwilling to throw their considerable economic weight around, Japanese politicians and businesspeople are shy about commenting on other nation’s internal affairs and government policies. Not this time. Representatives of Japanese business and diplomats were among the irst to remind the British of the substantial inward investment made by more than 1,000 Japanese companies into the UK. Banks, carmakers, engineering irms and others have all made an outstanding contribution to the renaissance of British business over the past few decades. They were attracted by many things: a lexible labour market and relatively harmonious industrial relations; liberalised capital markets and a global inancial centre; skills; political and economic stability; and the English language as the international language of business. Above all, though, for many irms the main lure has been access to the largest single market in the world, in the European Union. Since the irst Nissan Bluebird rolled off the production line in Sunderland in 1986, to the £24bn purchase by Softbank of Cambridge-based chip designer ARM a couple of years ago, Japanese companies have secured employment and decent wages for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the UK. Britain was Japan’s gateway into Europe, and billions of pounds of investment has been ploughed into this country, on the understanding that this would always be the case. With Brexit, that trust has now been breached. The Japanese feel it acutely.