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global justice now
Despite 'Big Tariff' Threat From Trump, UK Urged to 'Raise, Not Abolish' Tax on Tech Giants
"We need to stop kowtowing to him, stop offering him humiliating and unpopular 'state' visits, and start enacting economic policies that put the interest of people here ahead of Donald Trump," said one campaigner.
Apr 24, 2026
After President Donald Trump threatened to impose a new tariff on the United Kingdom over its Digital Services Tax, the head of a UK economic justice organization on Friday called for standing up to the US leader and even increasing the levy.
The 2% tax on digital companies such as search engines and social media networks that derive value from UK users—which applies to US tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google—has generated significant revenue annually, including £808 million, or over $1 billion, for the 2024-25 financial year.
"We don't like it when they target American companies... whether we like those companies or don't like 'em," Trump—whose inauguration last year featured several ultrarich tech executives—said Thursday. He accused the UK of trying to "make an easy buck" and warned that "they better be careful."
"If they don't drop the tax, we'll probably put a big tariff on the UK," the president continued, suggesting that the tariff would be "more than what they're getting" from the policy targeting Big Tech.
Responding in a Friday statement, Nick Dearden, director of UK-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, said that "Trump's latest threats prove, yet again, that if you give in to a bully, they'll just come back for more."
Just months after striking a bilateral trade deal that notably did not alter the tax on tech companies, Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed an artificial intelligence pact last September. The latter, said Dearden, "rolled out the red carpet to Trump's Big Tech barons."
"But this wasn't the end of the story. Rather, the pact has given Trump an ongoing vehicle to bully the British government," the campaigner continued. "It's time to admit that Stramer's strategy towards Trump has been an abject failure. We should raise, not abolish the digital services tax, which has already raised billions of pounds for the British economy."
"Trump won't like this but that's just too bad, we need to stop kowtowing to him, stop offering him humiliating and unpopular 'state' visits, and start enacting economic policies that put the interest of people here ahead of Donald Trump," he argued—as the UK's King Charles III and his wife Camilla, the queen consort, prepare to meet with Trump at the White House on Monday.
Asked about Trump's tech tax threats, a spokesperson for Starmer's office told The Guardian that "our position on that is unchanged... It is a hugely important tax to make sure that those businesses continue to pay their share. So it is a fair and proportionate approach to taxing business activities in the UK."
As the newspaper noted:
The digital services tax is only meant to be an interim measure, and the UK government agreed in 2021 to phase it out, averting the threat of retaliatory tariffs on British products from the US.
The tax was meant to be replaced in 2024 with a new global system after the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) brokered a deal between 140 countries, including the UK, that proposed large multinational companies paying tax in the countries where they do business committed themselves to a minimum 15% corporation tax rate. Implementation has been beset with delays as a number of countries have continued to raise objections over the regime.
Trump's tariff threat comes after he has lashed out at Starmer—and other European officials—in recent weeks over their limited support for his illegal war on Iran. The US leader suggested to the BBC this week that he and the UK prime minister could only "recover" if the Labour leader embraced stricter immigration policies and "opened the North Sea" to the fossil fuel industry.
"I'm here to serve the British people always, to have their interests and to make sure that I make the right decisions for them," Starmer told the British broadcaster. "That is why I took the decision that we would not be dragged into the war in Iran."
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Trump-Starmer AI Deal Slammed for Putting 'Interests of US Tech Bros' Ahead of the Common Good
"Instead of bending over backwards to appease Trump in an attempt to avoid his tariff bullying, it’s time for Starmer to show real leadership and stand up to him," said one campaigner.
Sep 18, 2025
Critics of the artificial intelligence pact signed Thursday by US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that the deal sacrifices the climate, data privacy, creators' copyrights, and British sovereignty on the altar of Silicon Valley profits.
Speaking at Chequers—the country estate of UK prime ministers in Buckinghamshire—Trump said that "we're taking the next logical step with a historic agreement on science and technology partnerships, and this will create new government, academic, and private sector cooperation in areas such as AI, which is taking over the world."
Laughing, Trump turned to tech bosses gathered for the event and—singling out Jensen Huang, CEO of chip-maker Nvidia—said: "And I'm looking at you guys. You're taking over the world, Jensen. I don't know what you're doing here. I hope you're right."
Along with Huang—who heads the world's largest publicly traded company—the CEOs of Apple, and ChatGPT creator OpenAI joined Trump on his UK trip.
Starmer said the deal involves more than $200 billion in total US investments and will create 15,000 jobs over the next decade. The prime minister named US companies including Amazon, Blackstone, Boeing, Citigroup, and Microsoft, and UK firms like AstraZeneca, BP, GSK, and Rolls Royce as being part of the deal.
Other companies involved in the agreement include Google and its AI laboratory DeepMind, OpenAI, Oracle, Salesforce, and ScaleAI in the United States and AI Pathfinder, DataVita, NScale, and Sage in Britain.
DeSmog UK deputy director Sam Bright reported Thursday that the investment bank led by Warren Stephens, Trump's ambassador to London, owns hundreds of millions of dollars in shares of tech companies involved in the AI deal, including Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
Like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Nvidia, Stephens—who is a billionaire—made a seven-figure donation to Trump's inauguration fund.
Prominent critics of the agreement include former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who is also Meta's former president of global affairs. Speaking Wednesday at a Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, Clegg said the deal leaves Britain with "sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley" and "is just another version of the United Kingdom holding on to Uncle Sam’s coattails."
Opposition to the tech deal was also widespread Wednesday at a central London protest against Trump's visit organized by the Stop Trump Coalition.
Nick Dearden, director of the campaign group Global Justice Now and a spokesperson for the Stop Trump Coalition, noted in an interview with Wired senior business editor Natasha Bernal that the details of the pact have not been made public.
"We have not seen the text of the deal. We don’t know what we have given away," Dearden said. "We know that some of the tech barons accompanying Trump want us to drop parts of our regulation, want us to drop the digital services tax, want us to make it easier for them to acquire and merge with each other to become even bigger monopolies, so we are worried about that.”
So Trump swept into the UK to be wined and dined by the King.Big Tech bosses came too, bearing pledges of huge UK investments (mostly for data centres).Our govt, desperate for good economic news, is boosting this as a win for the UK.But the *point* of US Big Tech is to monopolise the data.
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— Critical Takes on Corporate Power (@criticaltakes.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 5:14 AM
Gobal Justice Now trade campaigner Seema Syeda said in a statement:
This toxic technology pact that favors the interests of US tech bros and rich corporations over ordinary people must be opposed at all costs. It’s a democratic scandal that the public and Parliament have been left in the dark as to its contents to date, but what we do know should ring alarm bells. Instead of bending over backwards to appease Trump in an attempt to avoid his tariff bullying, it’s time for Starmer to show real leadership and stand up to him. We can’t let an egomaniac like Trump hold our rights and democracy hostage.
Clive Teague—who was at the London rally supporting Extinction Rebellion Waverley and Borders in Surrey—told Bernal that he does not oppose AI if it is powered by renewable energy.
"We can’t keep burning fossil fuels to keep feeding into these data centers, because it’ll swamp the requirements for the rest of the world," Teague said.
Global Justice Now also warned that the tech deal could expose National Health Service (NHS) patient data to exploitation, wweaken digital privacy protections, thwart regulation of AI, and limit the government's taxation options.
Also sounding the alarm on the US-UK AI deal are scores of creators and creative groups including Elton John, Paul McCartney, and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, who decried what they say is the Starmer government's failure to adequately protect copyrighted works from unauthorized use by AI companies.
As the Prime Minister prepares to meet President Trump during the state visit, WGGB has joined over 70 of the UK’s leading creators + creative orgs in signing an open letter demanding the Government explains its failure to protect the rights of UK copyright holderswritersguild.org.uk/creators-ai/
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— Writers' Guild of Great Britain (@writersguildgb.bsky.social) September 16, 2025 at 2:44 AM
"Artificial intelligence companies have ingested millions of copyright works without permission or payment, in total disregard for the UK’s legal protections," they said in an open letter. "The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens—not to promote corporate interests, particularly where they are primarily based abroad."
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Trump Trade 'Deal' With UK Ripped as Another 'Con on American Workers'
"At this point the goal of policy seems to be to goose the market for the next few days, with no long-term plan."
May 08, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday unveiled the framework of a trade deal with the United Kingdom that was extremely light on details despite being billed as a "full and comprehensive agreement," leading critics to describe the fanfare surrounding the announcement as a cynical photo op for both sides.
In a statement, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer touted the deal as "historic" while acknowledging that it is incomplete. Trump insisted the deal is "maxed out," though he told reporters in the Oval Office that "the final details are being written up in the coming weeks."
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, meanwhile, described the agreement as one "in concept," drawing comparisons to Trump's widely derided statement on the campaign trail that he had a "concept of a plan" on healthcare.
Melinda St. Louis, Global Trade Watch director at Public Citizen, said Thursday that "Trump may have enjoyed having his ego stroked by Starmer and [U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick fawning over him for 'closing' a deal—one that is obviously not actually done—but his con on American workers continues."
"The American and British people need to see whatever text there is or is developed in ongoing talks—and no deal should be approved or go into effect without going through proper on-the-record public comment processes and congressional oversight," said St. Louis. "We need to know, for instance, when they claim to address 'non-tariff barriers,' just what giveaways for Big Tech may be inserted on behalf of Elon Musk and Trump's other tech-bro billionaire buddies, given that he waved around Big Tech's wish list when he announced the tariffs."
"With claims of dozens more 'deals' in progress," St. Louis added, "Congress must act swiftly to demand transparency and accountability in any trade deal before Trump and his team sell off our country for parts behind closed doors."
According to summaries released by the Trump White House and U.K. government, the bilateral trade framework would leave in place the 10% tariff rate that Trump has applied to all imports to the U.S. while providing targeted tariff relief for the British auto, steel, and aluminum industries.
The White House also said, without providing specific details, that the deal would "significantly expand U.S. market access in the U.K., creating a $5 billion opportunity for new exports for U.S. farmers, ranchers, and producers."
The U.K. is the first country to announce an agreement in principle with Trump since he unilaterally imposed tariffs on imports to the U.S. last month, invoking emergency authority. The U.S. ran a trade surplus with the U.K. last year, and experts questioned the extent to which the terms of the agreement broadly outlined Thursday would change the trade dynamic between the two countries.
"At this point the goal of policy seems to be to goose the market for the next few days, with no long-term plan," suggested economist Paul Krugman.
Around the world, stocks rose in response to the U.S.-U.K. announcement.
Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, said that Thursday's events were primarily "about appeasing Trump"—but cautioned that worse could be coming in the near future.
"While there are limited tariff reductions, we remain in a much worse position than we were six months ago," Dearden argued. "What's more, Trump could impose new tariffs at any time because Starmer has proven to him that his threats work: caving in to a bully is not something to be celebrated. Today's press conference also fires the starting gun on a genuinely scary, fuller trade deal, and there are strong indications our rights, standards, and protections will be up for grabs in that larger agreement."
"Unless we stand up to this deal, the British public will pay a very high price for Starmer's friendship with Donald Trump," Dearden added.
In a blog post published ahead of Thursday's announcement, Dearden warned that the new framework could set the stage for a deal that locks the U.K. "into policies that favor the unchecked growth of tech monopolies: deregulated AI, increased corporate access to NHS data, and restrictions on our ability to rein in Silicon Valley giants."
"Worse may be coming unless we stop treating trade negotiations as a matter of royal prerogative," wrote Dearden. "We need a modern, democratic process for international agreements—transparent, accountable, and inclusive. But Starmer has shown that such reform won't be gifted by those in power. It must be demanded."
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