Sir Keir Starmer is facing fresh calls to head a new Cabinet committee tasked with protecting British businesses from the rising costs of global economic shocks, after one of the country’s most influential lobby groups warned that the UK continues to face dangerous disruption.
In a report published on Sunday evening, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said a decade marked by Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine had exposed the lack of meaningful contingency planning to insulate the UK economy as global supply chains collapse.
The intervention comes at a specific time. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz for two months as a result of the Middle East war is expected to drive up British inflation in the coming quarter and is already tightening supplies of components for food and heavy industry.
Shevaun Haviland, director general of the BCC, said small and medium-sized businesses had been “permanently damaged” by the wave of global shocks and could no longer be left alone to cope with the fallout.
“The UK’s inadequate economic security has become a constraint on growth, competitiveness and national strength. Yet it is still not receiving the focus and urgency it requires. The wars in Ukraine and Iran have shown how supply chains can be disrupted overnight. We now live in a world where trading interests can be weaponized and where the lack of security of key raw materials means we cannot grow.”
At the heart of the BCC’s recommendations is the creation of a Cabinet Committee on Economic Security, chaired by the then prime minister, to coordinate Whitehall’s response to trade disputes, retaliatory tariffs and attempts to exclude British exporters from foreign markets.
The proposal follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s February decision to strike down President Donald Trump’s so-called “liberation day” tariffs. This decision did little to mitigate the chilling effect of his protectionist agenda on free trade economies, many of which were forced to develop emergency retaliatory measures of their own.
The lobby group is also calling on ministers to follow Brussels’ lead and forge a British version of the EU’s “anti-coercion instrument”, introduced in 2023 and described by some officials as a “trade bazooka”. The mechanism would authorize the government to impose import tariffs and other punitive trade restrictions on companies based in jurisdictions that it believes are violating international trade obligations.
The numbers underline this. The BCC estimates that more than 75 percent of British manufactured goods sold abroad have their origins in imported components, while imports and exports together account for around 60 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product. Few advanced economies, the report argues, rely so heavily on the smooth running of others’ logistics.
Diversifying this supply chain so that Britain is less reliant on a small group of suppliers for the raw materials that will underpin the industries of the future must become a strategic priority, the BCC says. Demand for lithium, copper and aluminum, the building blocks of electric vehicles, batteries and renewable infrastructure, is expected to surge over the next decade as consumers and businesses switch to greener products.
China’s near-monopoly in refining and processing many of these critical minerals is, the BCC believes, the clearest example of why ministers should speed up domestic production where possible and reorient supply chains towards “friendlier” trading partners.
For Britain’s small and medium-sized exporters – many of whom still suffer from the scars of Brexit-related bureaucracy and pandemic-era cost increases – the message from the Westminster business community can no longer be missed: in a time of arms trafficking, economic security is no longer the domain of the Foreign Office. It is increasingly a board-level concern.
