Top Trumps; if you’re in the concrete business!


The UK’s Brexit card looked hard to beat for a few short months but as usual the good old US of A pulls out a winning hand.

It couldn’t happen………could it? How many times have we heard that over the last 18 months? Jeremy Corbyn, put up as the token far left Labour leader candidate to loud guffaws, not only wins once but twice with a huge majority.

The UK’s leaders so believed that “it couldn’t happen” that they made no plans for the eventual decision to leave the EU and are playing catch up whilst waiting to find out if it’s all actually legal.

And now the most powerful nation on earth has elected a President with no political experience whatsoever and more dirty washing trailing behind him than Widow Twankey.

So, what we do now know for sure is that the world’s political experts know less about their subject than originally thought and all polls are meaningless.

Any good news?

Strangely, the Trump & Farage show could paint a slightly different picture of Europe post Brexit. It’s difficult to know if Mr Obama meant it when he said the UK would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal or if he was just trying to help prop up the stance of ally Cameron.

Threats and promises made during election campaigns should always be taken with a pinch of salt, but Mr Trump’s desire to get a trade deal in place with the UK “as soon as possible” is echoed by his trade advisor Dan DiMicco. Conversely the current trade deal between the USA and Europe, frequently described by Trump as the worst deal in the world, looks very flaky indeed and flaky enough to send Messrs Junker and Tusk in a rush to get the invitation cards out.

Of course all of this may have to wait until another Trump pledge if fulfilled. His desire to get Hilary Clinton sewing mail bags dressed in an orange all-in-one seems to have been taken very seriously among the more vocal of his supporters.

Build, build, build!

Building firms and allied trades were set to get a boost whichever way the result went. Mrs Clinton’s promise to spend $250bn on infrastructure projects was subsequently trumped with the offer of $500bn in the first presidential term.

And then of course there is the much talked about possibility of a large construction job going on down Mexico way. Suppliers of aggregate will understandably be rubbing their hands together at the thought of a wall some 1,900 miles long requiring 339 million cubic feet of concrete.

Ironically, almost exactly 27 years to the day since the world rid itself of one famous barrier to freedom the leader of the free world wants to build another one.

According to Mr Trump though, it would be “a beautiful wall”.

 

by Steve Leeves