DON’T stay in customs unions – Aussie envoy
BRITAIN will become a humiliated and irrelevant outpost if it stays tied to a EU customs union after Brexit, the Australian high commissioner has warned.
Alexander Downer, his nation’s top diplomat in London, declared: ‘It would be humiliating for a once-great country to end up by being little more than a dependency of the EU.’
Staying in the customs union would leave Britain little more than an EU outpost and risk being entirely ignored by the wider world, he told the Policy Exchange think tank. ‘For us in the outside world, Britain would become, at least in economic terms, irrelevant to international diplomacy.
‘You would be better off remaining within the EU or being completely out of it than leaving yourselves in such a position of weakness and irrelevancy.’
Mr Downer, 66, has repeatedly said that the UK should have more confidence in its ability to thrive outside the EU.
‘This is something you can do relatively easily provided you yourselves wish to open your markets to the outside world,’ he said. Staying in the customs union would mean goods moving to and from the Continent without tariffs or checks exactly as now. But it would also stop the UK signing new trade deals with nations such as Australia or lowering prices across the board by reducing tariffs.
And because Britain would no longer be helping to set EU policy, it would have to abide by rules over which it had no say.
Mr Downer joked that the Britain’s competitive attitude should ensure success, saying: ‘You like to beat us at sport. For heaven sake, don’t let us beat you at trade negotiating.’
He took aim at Remainers who say the UK must stick close to Brussels because our civil servants lack the expertise to sign trade deals after decades of EU control. They also suggest that the EU can cut better deals because it is a far larger.
Some fear that this argument is being made only to keep the door half-open to a return to full EU membership.
In a coded rebuke to the Labour Party, Mr Downer also warned against strangling Britain’s world-leading financial services industry with too much regulation. He said: ‘You have a fine goose in the City of London. You need to keep that goose laying its golden eggs so that London can remain the greatest financial centre the world has ever known.
‘Embracing the politics of envy and overregulating and attacking the City is only going to kill the goose.’
Mr Downer, formerly a centre-right Liberal Party politician, said Britain’s politically correct elites – ‘Parliament, the Civil Service, the BBC, the media, academia and even parts of the professions’ – do not understand the patriotism and tolerance of ordinary people.
‘Contrary to the view of many in the commentariat, the British are very accepting of people of all races and religions,’ he said. ‘But it is not entirely clear to me that the elite understand that in Britain there is great pride in the country’s traditions and institutions.
‘Generations of leaders have played down the country’s national identity and replaced it with a near-obsession with identity politics.’