Politics Jane Clifton
The UK’s Brexit mess is amusing from afar, but trade links are crucial.
Never mind “fight them on the beaches” and “never surrender!” British Prime Minister Theresa May just got her homework marked by Brussels before delivering a 500-page surrender pact that makes even Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement look pretty feisty.
From this former colonial outpost, Britain’s slowmotion nervous breakdown over leaving the European Union can’t help but excite a sense of utu.
The essence of it: how dare other countries tell us what to do, take our money and overrun us with their people when we are a sovereign country!
Funnily enough, the other formerly pink bits in the atlas didn’t like it much in the days when Britain did all that to them.
It’s also a therapeutic dose of schadenfreude to realise that, just as Mother England left New Zealand to paddle its own vulnerable trade waka when it joined the European Common Market and cut off our preferential access, it will soon have to renegotiate its trade deals with us and our trans-Pacific trade-pact (CPTPP) mates from its own lonely waka – and probably more on our terms than its.
That said, it’s probably wise to curtail one’s gloating about Britain’s discomfiture, because what just happened at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in Port Moresby shows we’ve all got more to worry about than where Britain can export its Dyson vacuum cleaners and Jammie Dodgers.
China and the US butted heads to the point where, for the first time in its history, Apec could not co-operate on a communiqué. Let’s not panic; everyone did agree to put on the silly shirts for the leaders’ photo, which remains an annual feat of multilateralism. But failing to reach agreement on the blandest of propositions, such as “let’s all play nicely on trade”, suggests we’re now into gunboat rather than waka diplomacy.
We all know the issues: the US says China uses illicit trade practices such as dumping – which is true – and China says US protectionism is a destructive and unfair trade practice – also true. But the open sniping between US Vice President Mike Pence and Chinese President Xi Jinping, culminating in Chinese delegates storming the Papua New Guinean foreign office demanding to rewrite the draft communiqué, was drama of a most ominous kind.
RCEP VERSUS MAGA
World trade is in for a bumpy and potentially recessionary ride. Nothing causes investment retreat like uncertainty.
On the plus side, this has revved up progress on multilateral trade deals, notably the Regional Cooperative Economic Partnership (RCEP), which would unite us and Australia with China, Japan, India, Korea and South-East Asia. In gang affiliation terms, wearing an RCEP patch would out-staunch the scary Maga (Make America Great Again) patch big time. RCEP talks here last month heightened hopes that India, notoriously elusive in trade negotiations, might be coaxed over the line.
Not that we can afford to pick sides. We’re also allied with the US against China in its Belt and Road Initiative to buy access and co-operation throughout the Pacific. Foreign Minister Winston Peters optimistically calls this a “sweet spot” between the two superpowers. However, it’s really just siding with both countries on a “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” basis at the same time and hoping they won’t notice. It would be simplistic to think free and fair trade
Britain’s slow-motion nervous breakdown over leaving the European Union can’t help but excite a sense of utu.
will be further advanced if enough of us just hold hands across the globe, because China and the US have the heft to make up their own rules as they go along, whatever they might have signed up to. But multilateralism is better than bobbing about in separate waka hoping not to get swamped.
TRY AS SHE MAY
Which returns us to the hunched, lonely figure of May, clutching her unworkable Brexit deal so Britain can go it alone when everyone except the US is hooking up.
May’s proposal would be a sort of wheel clamp on British trade, and has been welcomed accordingly by threats of a Cabinet coup or snap election and a campaign to re-run the referendum. At press time May seemed likely to survive because, however woeful her deal, no one can credibly promise to do better. Chief EU-rocrats Donald Tusk and JeanClaude Juncker make US President Donald Trump look like a big sook. They’ve allowed no concessions and even forbade Britain to start new trade deal talks until it’s formally out of the union. If Britain wants to continue to trade with EU countries – and economically it has to – then it must continue to abide by EU rules. But as it will no longer be round the table, it will no longer have a say in those rules.
So, Britain won’t have its cake, and won’t eat it either. That’ll teach the EU to mess with it.
This is less an escape from Eurooppression than a form of day-release with an ankle bracelet and no conjugal rights. In the process, the Kingdom has become less United, because the two Irelands now face border issues, and similar to Scotland, Northern Ireland voted “remain”. Wales voted “leave”, but as it has had more EU money spent on it than any other country, it could well change its mind.
Momentum is gathering for a fresh referendum – hilariously dubbed a “people’s vote”, as though this might somehow disguise the fact that the people already voted, by 3.8 percentage points, to leave. Still, it was hardly a decisive margin and it’s now beyond dispute that voters were lied to about what was possible. Brexit as originally pitched – freedom from EU diktat and expulsion of immigrants – is undeliverable. A fresh vote could be justified. But that would bring civil unrest, to say the least, because so many Britons simply refuse to accept that Brexit can’t be delivered as promised. It can, but only at punishing economic cost in halted trade. This would, of course, hurt the EU as well, but that is small comfort to anyone.
A further anti-gloat: Britain’s farm lobby is already pressing to stop our sheep-meat exports, as the risk of a no-deal crash-out of the EU raises the spectre of a new Fortress Britain.
Need we remind our former ruler that, even without invoking the mighty powers of our CPTPP trade gang, we’ve recently banned their Weetabix labels? Don’t make us angry, Britain, or we might come for your Bovril and Coronation Street next.
It would be simplistic to think free and fair trade will be further advanced if enough of us just hold hands across the globe.