The NFU needs to up its game
By Pete North - June 17, 2021
“The UK’s obsession with trade deals means disaster for the environment” says Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now in The Guardian. Dearden, for some reason is the media’s trade scaremonger in chief and he basically writes the same catastrophising article and issues the same quotes each time – the usual litany of mewling of which we’re all intensely bored . He picks out a theme such as ISDS, makes it sound extra spooky, then picks out a few (old) examples and misrepresents them. It doesn’t take too much googling to get to the truth of the matter, but the kind of fodder he produces is almost exclusively for an audience that won’t do any fact checking and have no curiosity whatsoever.
Similarly we get the boilerplate waffle about food standards, and though there are themes we should look at with cautious, it’s always the general over the specific, and always with an eco-NGO bias. Coupled with the usual tropes about deregulation, the picture painted is one of impending Armageddon. Nobody outside the Waitrose Warrior brigade is going to take any of this seriously. There needs to be measured analysis but that’s precisely what we’re not seeing.
The trap set here is that because the NFU etc does no thinking of its own, producing nothing in the way of serious analysis, it ends up adopting these same tropes developed by lefty NGOs which they deployed in Brussels. It’s then too easy to dismiss it as protectionist excuses, and remoaner petulance only a short skip away from the lunacy of Extinction Rebellion. That then makes it far easier for the Telegraph to peddle its own brand of dishonesty and issue illiteracy which to the untrained eye looks sane by contrast.
The fact of the matter is that if we are going to build trade relationships with other countries (and we can’t afford not to in or out of the EU) then these are the issues we bump into. Virtually everything they’re saying about Tory FTAs can be said in equal measure of EU FTAs and there’s an entire lobbying machine in Brussels turning out these exact same critiques. There is plenty of fodder to that effect on bilaterals.org. Why anyone goes to a rank amateur like Dearden beats the hell out of me.
When it comes to the UK-Australia deal, it doesn’t contain ISDS and though there is a ramped reduction in tariffs, there are still safeguard measures not entirely dissimilar in nature to Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol. The argument against this kind of radical liberalisation is the precedent it sets for other trade deals. Though Australia likely can’t supply UK demand, Argentina and Brazil probably can. If they need to add cattle rearing capacity they will just bulldoze a rainforest or two. That’s when the environmental arguments of Dearden et al have greater relevance.
But then by the same token, FTAs are still constrained by international conventions and treaties on everything from water to deforestation. Like safeguard measures, we already have the protective pretext at our disposal if we choose to use them. That is the central problem. The protections are there and there is no slam dunk argument for not signing FTAs save for the fact that the Tories won’t use those use safeguards for as long as they’re under the spell of the “free trade” cult on the right of the party. We have a completely side-lined parliament and even then, with an eighty seat majority, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Put simply, the problem is not with FTAs, rather it is the unchecked power of our own executive.
This is of acute concern especially now that, at this critical juncture, we have no opposition to speak of – and even Emily Thornberry (shadow trade minister) at her best is still leaden with Brexit baggage. The case for democratising trade, therefore, has to come from outside of politics, preferably from something like the NFU. But for as long as it’s repeating the anti-trade mantras of embittered remoaners and eco-fanatics, it will struggle to bridge the credibility gulf and will hand the Tories a free pass.