Politics: the new reality

By Richard North - February 3, 2025

Suddenly, after just a short period of hyperactivity on the part of Donald Trump, there are many world-shaping events to discuss, not least the US imposition of tariffs which has the potential to bring down the global rules-based order on international trade.

Inevitably, there are squeals of alarm, and not just from the expected “right wing” free-trade lobby. Even the Guardian is joining in, with its economics editor, Heather Stewart, complaining that Trump’s tariffs “could have a grim knock-on effect for UK’s economy”.

So far, only Canada, Mexico and China are in the frame, but the US president is also thinking of applying tariffs to the EU, having announced that “The EU has treated us so terribly”.

This, therefore, is exactly the right time (not) for Ed Davey to be prattling about starting talks with the EU on a new customs union – just supposing he actually knows what one is.

Certainly, the BBC doesn’t seem to have enhanced its understanding, as it talks of the government ruling “rejoining the EU’s customs union”, which is just as well because it can’t do that anyway. The EU’s arrangements are a core part of the treaties (Article 28 TFEU) to the extent that only members of the EU can actually be part of it.

The EU, however, is in customs unions with Andorra, San Marino and Turkey (with the exceptions of certain goods), so a separate arrangement is possible, but to contemplate a common external tariff (and tariff-free movement of goods between the EU and the UK) just a Trump seeks to impose his own tariffs on EU trade is to risk dragging the UK into a fight that we could very well have avoided.

In all probability though, at a time of extreme global instability in international trade, the EU has more important things to worry about than negotiating a new deal with the UK, which will impact of the TCA and effectively amount to a partial renegotiation of a chapter that has already been firmly closed.

It thus takes a special kind of moron even to contemplate broaching this subject right now (or at all), a task for which Davey is uniquely qualified, but in many ways it typifies the almost complete absence of grasp our political “elites” have of EU affairs.

If the chances of them catching up are slight, they are going to be even more at sea as Trump’s so-called “tariff war” gets into gear. Not least, it puts the Brexit debate in a different light, if one recalls that the wet dream of the more mindless section of the “leave” fraternity was a new relationship with the EU based on WTO rules – the so-called “WTO Option”.

One has to say this option was never viable, specifically because, in the rules-based order prevailing at the time, Brussels, as head of the most advanced regulatory union in the world, was setting (directly and indirectly) most of the global trading rules – mostly through its interaction with bodies such as the FAO, the UNECE and many others.

This gave rise to the so-called “Brussels Effect”, which enabled the EU to punch above its weight, working through the embrace of globalisation to become a regulatory superpower, where its reach even extended, via the backdoor, into the US legislative machine.

For as long as America was led by Democrats and faux-conservatives, determined to uphold the “international rules-based order”, the EU had the upper hand in setting the terms of trade by way of being a large regulatory union.

But this could only last as long as the United States had been prepared to play by the same soft power rulebook, as had the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, and never really challenged by successive GOP presidents – who have been in thrall to the “free trade” lobby (including the first Trump administration).

The extent of the change we are now confronting is, therefore, profound. In his second coming, Trump has done to the WTO/GATT treaties much what the unfortunate Salwan Momika did to copies of the Koran. But since the president has already been shot – and is now better protected, one hopes – he is free to set the world trade system on fire in his own inimitable manner.

Trump is playing hard power games on his own terms, calling time on a system which is essentially powerless and has largely relied on voluntary compliance against the backdrop of the US refusing to wield the power it had.

It was this voluntary abstinence that allowed to EU gradually to co-opt the nexus of international organisations and promote its own agendas. But, in the nature of things, the EU has over-reached, progressively linking first its “social justice” and then its net-zero agendas with international trade, further linked to a suicidal approach to energy policy.

With Trump breaking from the trend of trade liberalisation and basically throwing away the rule book, all that matters now is US economic might. By essentially calling a halt to globalisation and trashing the “rules-based order”, the EU’s soft power evaporates virtually overnight.

If America is playing hardball, everyone else must as well. The script now looks very different from what it did a few years ago. Brexit may well have spared us from being shackled to a corpse, although those who were so stridently advocating the WTO Option look more than a little foolish as their rules-based framework is on the verge of collapse.

That said, the perturbations are by no means confined to trade, and there is a sense that even the EU is following America’s lead, particularly in terms of the vexed question of third-world economic migration. Although, being the EU, it is seeking to amend the rules rather than put them unceremoniously to the torch.

This much we learn from a confused piece in The Times headed: “EU plans to let states deport failed asylum seekers and criminals”, with the sub-head “Planned overhaul to 1951 Refugee Convention, which is seen in member governments as not fit for purpose now, would be biggest policy shift in decades”.

The European Union, we are told, is drawing up a plan to overhaul the post-war convention on refugees that prevents countries from rejecting asylum seekers at their borders in what may be one of the biggest shifts in migration policy in decades.

There is, the article says, a growing consensus across Europe that the 1951 Refugee Convention, drafted after the Second World War and added to by rulings in the European and EU courts, is no longer fit for purpose”.

We thus see a quote from a diplomatic paper “seen by The Times”, which tells us that: “It should be noted that these principles were developed after the end of the Second World War and were characterised by a very different geopolitical situation to that of today”.

Where the article goes off the rails is in telling us that the 1951 convention was signed by 144 countries and defines legal obligations for countries enshrined in the fundamental principle of non-refoulement. This principle establishes that no asylum seeker may be returned to a country where his or her life or freedom could be seriously threatened.

The point here is that the original 1951 treaty was time-limited to events before 1 January 1951 and was intended mostly for Europe. What did the damage was the 1967 protocol which lifted the time limit and extended the application of the treaty to the rest of the world.

That was the big mistake which is partly responsible for the mess we are in now, and the fact that the EU is looking at it again further signals that the post-war settlement is breaking down.

Thus, the EU governments are concerned that national powers allowing “limitations on the application” of the right of asylum, are currently only permitted in “extraordinary situations” that do not take the “new reality” into account, the paper states.

Acknowledging that “new reality”, the paper – tabled by Poland – goes on to say that “member state societies’ ability to host large numbers of migrants is increasingly being put to the test, especially in situations where some migrants do not seek to integrate into the host society but instead to form separate communities in which norms and rules that deviate from European values may be cultivated”.

Inevitably though, with the EU involved, progress is going to be sluggish but divorced from events in Europe and without any great influence in the White House, there is a risk that the UK becomes stranded, not so much in a no man’s land as in the middle of an active war zone, with not even an ’ole for shelter.

This is the UK’s own version of the “new reality”, where our governments and elites still have to make up their minds where they stand, still dominated by Dean Acheson’s 1962 observation that “Great Britain has lost an Empire but not yet found a role”.

For the elites of the time, the then Common Market was the answer, but while the likes of Ed Davey still hanker after their wet dream of rejoining the EU, for the rest of us it is time to decide where we stand. And the world is not going to wait while we dither.