This is how Donald Trump's tariff war could affect your bin collection

Last week, a man dressed as a giant rat stood up at a city council meeting in Birmingham to ask about the ongoing bin-collection strikes. He said he was the ‘Selly Oak rat’. I think it was a man. The rats rummaging amongst the uncollected 21,000 tonnes (21,000!) of rubbish in the city recently hit the ‘size of a small kitten’ stage. By the time you read this, they may have got to the size of a dire wolf. Or a big man. The response to the giant rat’s query was as expected – that a major incident had been declared and rubbish, at least some, was being collected. But the problem, that has been growing for over a month, remains. 

It’s tied to bin workers’ anger at what they say is a drop in wages. The council says very few people will be impacted. Talks continue.

A local radio producer once told me that if there was a quiet time and you needed to stoke the phone-ins, go to bins and potholes. I’d imagine that local radio in Birmingham has not needed to stoke the phone-ins for a while.

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While the rest of us stare aghast at the tariff mania from the White House, focus in the Midlands is on much more mundane matters. The day to day is what, ultimately, chimes. Which is what Donald Trump is counting on. He’s speaking to the many in America who feel they’ve been abandoned, who haven’t had their metaphorical bins collected for a long, long time. The financial markets don’t matter so much to them; they’re not going to be troubled by the soaring cost of imported BMWs. And who wouldn’t like the promise of better jobs coming soon, of a nation rising.

Oddly though, Trump is getting all Mao Zedong on us – ironic considering the fight he’s picking with China. So many of Mao’s sayings and amorphisms have become so commonplace they have lost their bite. But the one about revolution feels timely – revolution is not a dinner party, it’s an insurrection. This is where Trump is shouting from. All that pain now for the greater good is the same approach – and only if the system as was is completely upended.

Also, it’s wholly one man’s vision with little input from the quivering underlings. Still, I can’t see a five-volume set of Trump’s thoughts and philosophy anytime soon. Unless there are a lot of pictures of golf shots.

I’m guessing neither would like being compared to the other. Mao was hardly a fan of American imperialism and Trump isn’t ushering in the deaths of millions of his people. But while Trump and his yes men make noises about diminishing the size and influence of the state, they are in effect acting in a collective socialist way. What could be more statist than a country suppressing the capitalist agency of individual companies, subsuming it into the necessity of national growth?

The dark reality is that what Trump does will affect bin collections. In the past, councils in Britain have lost millions to bad investments in stocks. Shetland Council, for one, lost millions, costing jobs and services, during the last global financial downturn. They blamed bad investments. They were not alone. We don’t know how many councils are currently on the hook for big knocks. And that’s before we learn of how council pension schemes will suffer.

No matter how Trump frames his Great Leap Forward, everyone is going to take some sort of a hit. And as we know local authorities are already existing on fumes and are raising council taxes just to keep the wheels turning, it will be, as ever, the quiet, selfless armies of volunteers who will have to intervene and help.

The Selly Oak rat may be in quite some demand.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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