Retail tycoon Sir Philip Green’s human rights were not breached when he was named in parliament as the holder of an injunction against the Telegraph newspaper, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled.

The former Topshop boss previously obtained a court injunction preventing the Telegraph from publishing allegations of misconduct made against him by five ex-employees who had agreed to keep the details of their complaints confidential under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Sir Philip “categorically” denied any unlawful sexual behaviour.

However, he was named as the businessman behind the injunction in parliament in October 2018 by Labour peer Lord Hain who used parliamentary privilege.

Parliamentary privilege grants certain legal immunities for members of both the House of Commons and House of Lords and is in place to ensure MPs and peers can go about their work without fear of being sued or prosecuted for contempt of court.

Sir Philip brought a complaint to the ECHR, with lawyers for the Monaco-based businessman challenging the absence of controls on the power of parliamentary privilege to reveal information covered by an injunction.

On Tuesday, the ECHR ruled against Sir Philip.

In a unanimous decision, eight judges in Strasbourg found the right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had not been violated.

A majority of the judges also found that his complaints brought under Article 6, the right to a fair hearing, and Article 13, the right to an effective remedy, were “inadmissible”.

NDAs are legal contracts often used by companies to preserve confidentiality. If the contract is breached, the party breaking the agreement could be liable for damages in the form of hefty financial compensation.

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Following the ECHR ruling on Tuesday, Lord Hain said: “I’m really pleased that the Strasbourg Court [has] defended parliamentary privilege.”

Sir Philip became one of the UK’s best-known retail tycoons when he bought department store group BHS in 2000 and Topshop owner Arcadia Group in 2002.

But his reputation was damaged by the collapse of BHS after he sold the chain for one pound in 2015 to a businessman who had previously been declared bankrupt.

Arcadia Group subsequently went into administration in 2020.

Sky News has approached Sir Philip’s representatives for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.

Of course this is dramatic. Of course markets are slumping.

Because if you take Donald Trump at his word (something investors are now finally beginning to do), he is attempting single-handedly to reverse and uproot decades worth of economic history in the space of a few months.

Because if this really is “the end of globalisation”, as a few politicians, including Keir Starmer, are now calling it, it constitutes one of the most wrenching, painful episodes in modern times.

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To see what I mean, the best place to begin is by pondering the hidden life of the device you’re reading this on. I’m assuming it’s a smartphone, specifically the latest iPhone, but most of the following applies for other smartphones and, indeed, many laptops or desktop computers.

The display was made in South Korea or Japan. The camera module was made by Sony in Japan (who have a particular expertise in this type of specialised silicon that few other companies have been able to match). The batteries (for the latest iPhone at least) are made in India, though these days, the vast majority of the world’s cells are made in China.

On it goes – the memory chips from South Korea, which has a near monopoly on solid state storage silicon. The logic chips – the ones that help the device “think”- made in Taiwan, albeit with intellectual property (IP) from all over the world, including America and even Britain. Some of the chips do indeed come from the US – in particular the modem, though the company behind them (Qualcomm) sometimes manufactures in Taiwan. But there are some from Europe too – most notably the spatial sensor chips that come from Bosch in Germany.

Globalisation is in your hands

If you are looking for an example of “globalisation”, you couldn’t do much better than the smartphone. But even this potted geography lesson understates it because those fabrication plants in Taiwan and South Korea, turning out those silicon chips that help the phone think and remember stuff, are totally dependent on machines made by a company called ASML, based in the Netherlands. Those Dutch machines, in turn, contain components from hundreds of other companies around the world, including in Germany and the US. On it goes.

Nor is this degree of interconnectedness solely to be found in high-tech equipment. The other day, I was up in Scunthorpe at the blast furnaces of British Steel. It turns out the iron they smelt there doesn’t just go into the rails that striate this country. They also make the steel that go into the tracks of Caterpillar trucks.

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That’s right: the iconic tracked diggers – for many people the most American of all things – are all mounted on steel “track shoes” made in the North East of England (the plant is a little further north of Scunthorpe, in Skinningrove).

The further you look around the world of manufactured products, the more you realise that nearly everything you touch on a daily basis has, in the months before it arrived in your life, been on a long trip from factory to factory, taking it all around the world. That device you’re reading this on may say “made in China” on the back, but that’s an enormous over-simplification. It was made more or less everywhere.

This is the way the world works today – like it or not. In a sense it’s the ultimate extension of what Adam Smith discussed back in the earliest days of economics, when he described a “pin factory” where the work of making a simple pin was divided up between different people, with each worker specialising in a particular task rather than trying to make the whole pin themselves.

The swings and roundabouts of globalisation

Today, we have a sort of international division of labour. Today, nearly everyone goes to China to get their batteries. They go to South Korea to get their memory chips. The upshot is these factories have become ever more efficient at making their products. And – here’s where it matters for the rest of us – the price of making and buying this stuff goes down.

Today, the reason one can buy what would once have been classified as a supercomputer for a few hundred pounds is because of this division of labour. Globalisation made everything, from computers to Caterpillar trucks to T-Shirts, that bit cheaper than they would have been had we attempted to manufacture them all in a single country.

But the ugly side of this economic shift is that those regions that used to do the manufacturing – be it the “rust belt” of America or the Midlands and North East of England – have seen much of their traditional work disappear. And while economists have insisted that cheaper products make everyone better off in net terms, the reality is that these parts of our countries haven’t got better off. They have been hollowed out. And in time, resentment about globalisation has built up – for good reason.

Trump’s aspiration

This is the world we inhabit today. Unpicking it will be phenomenally difficult and phenomenally expensive. Trying to relocate all those functions – factories and labour markets with expertise that has built up over decades – would be incredibly difficult and would take a long time. But that seems, as far as anyone can tell, to be the aspiration of Donald Trump. That appears to be the objective of his tariff policy.

Up until now, most investors had assumed that the president wasn’t entirely serious about this – that he merely intended to scare a few Asian companies into opening factories in key swing states. And who knows – that may well turn out to be the case. But he certainly seems more serious this time around – and less fazed by the negative market reaction.

In the meantime, we are left with those tariffs.

Costs will go up

Think back to that iPhone. Think back to those Caterpillar tracks. All those components now face swinging tariffs when they arrive in the US. That will push up the cost of buying pretty much anything in the US and will accordingly push down the demand for those goods. And since America is the world’s consumer of last resort – the biggest importer of goods anywhere – that has an enormous bearing on demand around the world.

So, yes, of course, this is dramatic. Of course, markets are slumping. No one knows what the US president will do next. But either way, what happened last week in the Rose Garden will reverberate for a long time to come.

A major global economic shock is taking place; its duration unknown, its severity anyone’s guess, and no one has a surefire way of stopping it because it’s all based on the proclivities of one man who is supposed to be our ally.

Billions have been wiped off the stock market since Donald Trump announced his global tariff scheme last week, meaning a hit to prices, pensions and jobs that could get a lot worse.

So what can the government do, in practice?

After the economic shocks of modern times – the 2008 financial crisis and 2020 pandemic – hundreds of billions of pounds were served up by the UK government to cushion the impact. Debates rage to this day about whether banks should have been bailed out by Gordon Brown and whether Rishi Sunak’s COVID furlough scheme should have been so generous.

On both occasions, the Bank of England rose to the challenge too, using its quantitative easing scheme to ensure cheap money.

But as we stand on the precipice of economic decline of uncertain severity, it is clear that any kind of big bazooka option of the scale seen during those two crises is not open to the UK this time around.

Borrowing is so high, and taxes at record levels, that there is not the headroom to do this now. The government’s options are severely limited.

That, in practice, is the starting point for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The big concession today is that tariffs may be in place for some time – the hope of two weeks ago for a quick deal that dampens or exempts tariffs appears to be fading.

The White House says 50 nations are queuing up to do a deal – there is no guarantee we are close to the front of the queue.

So instead, they have to look for other answers that cost little – cutting red tape and helping business grow. And here, there are no straightforward answers.

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The big announcement on Monday is to water down green rules for cars, delaying a ban on hybrids to 2035 from 2030 and giving the car sector more flexibility to meet its electric car goals on the path to the end of the decade.

But, although the government did not want to talk about it, these involve trade-offs which is why they have not happened to date. When it comes to deregulation, there is no such thing as an easy win.

The policy watered down on Monday was on course to be, by a very large margin, the single biggest lever for the UK to achieve its climate goals for the 2030s, so this will blow an even bigger hole in the ability to get on track for net zero.

Meanwhile, this change of policy means uncertainty for different firms – those that make batteries and charging points are no longer in such urgent demand after Monday’s decisions.

Yet Rachel Reeves makes clear this approach is the one she will follow. Pharmaceuticals and steel will also get help in coming days.

But whatever the announcement, remember there’s a cost – just not one the government will spell out when it tries to get back on the front foot.