I'm John Batchel with my colleague, Joseph Sternberg, of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

He's in London.

And we've been speaking of the U.S. economy and the challenge of the tariffs and an idea that might even be less wise than the tariffs, to put it positively.

But now we come to something that I understand intrinsically from the headline.

It's that the British economy is deeply, deeply, deeply damaged.

UK economy is slow as tariffs take toll.

IMF predicts.

This is a headline in the London Times. U.S. growth also forecast to be

impacted as the Chancellor heads to Washington to seek an exemption from President Trump's trade war.

The economy of the Great Britain has been brittle for some time. I do not believe it's spent

two consecutive years underwater. It might

have. I've lost count of that. But the terrorists, have they dealt a blow that was not expected?

This headline suggests desperation. Yeah, this is a real problem for the UK and also, frankly, for much of the rest of Europe as well, because we're talking here in Britain about an economy that never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.

So, I mean, certainly after that event, they managed to achieve quite a few years where the economy was growing at a relatively

healthy clip. But, you know, in retrospect, there was never quite a sense that things had gotten

back to the way they had been before that event. And then you had all of the economic disruption

that surrounded Brexit and the uncertainty resulting from that. And then you had the pandemic. And, you know, then

things have really never recovered from the pandemic. And we had the cost of living or inflation

crisis. And now you're being hit by the tariffs from the U.S. on British exports at the same

time that the British economy is digesting

a series of domestic tax increases here in Britain that are taking the tax burden to the highest

it's been since the aftermath of World War II. And I can tell you, basically what you hear is a lot of

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