Trade policy: asleep at the wheel

By Pete North - October 28, 2021

Yesterday I was one of the seven people to watch trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan speaking to the International Trade Committee. She spoke of a ministerial statement to the WTO on embedding climate objectives in WTO activity and potential for leveraging climate action through trade deals. I heard much the same blather from her Labour counterpart just recently. It’s the boilerplate tract on the trade circuit right now. If you wish to be recognised as a voice in trade you have to recite this crapola as a right of passage.

As a policy, though, (if it can be called that), it is more or less continuity EU. Trade policy is not directed by an objectives of internal statecraft. Trade policy is, as usual, operating it its own jargon riddled little silo, informing nothing and informed by nothing.

One might have thought that jobs and “levelling up” might be central to the thinking, but it doesn’t look like there is any thinking going on at all. Our policy is to merely negotiate and agree FTAs because that’s the fullest extent of their understanding.

What hasn’t sunk in is that the UK is not the EU, and doesn’t really have the clout to leverage climate action through trade, not least because everyone else is paying only lip service to it. Environmental provisions were the first thing to be dropped to get the Australian deal over the line. Where Britain leads, nobody follows. As with our “climate leadership” in COP26, there is nobody more keen on economic suicide than the UK.

More to the point, neither Trevelyan nor Thornberry have worked out that the rush for climate action in trade is less to do with the climate as a new frontier in protectionism. It answers the question of how we pretend to still believe in trade liberalisation while gradually shutting down free trade. Carbon border levies are the new tariffs. Carbon counting paperwork is the new health certificate. The push for environmental clauses on deforestation is to protect British farming against deals that shouldn’t be struck in the first place. So why even are we going through the motions?

What was clear from the Committee is that there is no trade strategy to speak of and the government is not in any rush to publish one. Thus it would appear that our department of trade is running on autopilot doing those things it imagines a department of trade really ought to do but with no vision of what an independent Britain could do and certainly no ambition to speak of save for the usual bland and empty rhetoric about saving the planet.

When it comes to trade, as we have long said, the improvements come not from big headline deals but from the cumulative effect of hundreds of smaller scale initiatives, usually sector specific and on a multilateral basis, leaving the green crap at the door.

This is where you need an idea of what you want to achieve and to be acting unapologetically in the national interest. It seems to me that our political apparatus never got past the fluff of “cooperation” and “partnership”. They’re still marinated in the Brussels mentality but foolish enough to believe is means what it says. The extent to which the UK is involved in the nuts and bolts of new initiatives is unclear but it’s obvious the politicians are oblivious to it, thus such activity will not be subject to political scrutiny.

Worse still, there are very real problems emerging in global trade to which our politicians must address themselves. The shipping industry finds itself in deep crisis, and the various energy crunches across the globe have real world implications for supply chains and factories in the UK. Even before Brexit and Covid the trend was drifting toward nearshoring, and though things like CPTPP no no real harm, they don’t provide any real answers. The priority (apart from the obvious necessity to normalise EU trade relations) is safeguarding our food and energy supplies, protecting jobs those things that actually matter to taxpayers.

What we get instead are lightweight, brain dead politicians indulging their own hobby horses (international development/SDGs in the case of Trevelyan) when the global economy is imploding. In that sense it’s almost like we never left the EU. Insofar as Brexit impacted our political culture, it rapidly slipped back into its comatose state. Being that there was no plan for Brexit and the establishment could never really be bothered with it, they’ve elected to forget it happened and try and muddle through each crisis one at a time; the same hapless, rudderless managerialism that prevails in everything the Tories do.

As with energy, haulage, immigration and much else, we have a political class incapable of getting a grip, where the culmination of decades of policy indifference slips beyond their understanding and beyond their control. Trevelyan will claim her victories as she signs trade deals she hasn’t read or understood, the Tory press will cheer, but below the water line, it’s there for all to see that we are sinking.