Let’s look before we leap into Global Britain
Tories are ready for postbrexit trade deals. But they should beware of causing any more social upheaval
Brexit is moving on. Exciting, isn’t it? Last week’s transition agreement finally lets us negotiate, sign and ratify trade deals, which suddenly makes Liam Fox one of the most powerful men in Britain. Why? Because the deals he’ll be chasing will decide what kind of country we want to be outside the EU.
The dominant philosophy among modern Tories is free trade, which they assume is not only logical but in tune with Britain’s identity as a seafaring nation. They call this Global Britain. And yet conservatism, and the country, cannot be spoken for in a single slogan. A word of warning: Britain has valuable things to protect.
Last week we had a spat about where our passports should be made, and although the debate was a bit shallow, it showed how trade is the great sleeper issue of Western politics. We don’t discuss it much because (like Brexit once was) the pundits think the issue is settled. The case for the free movement of goods is, after all, practical and well-meaning. Buying products from abroad, where they are made more cheaply, enriches the developing world and cuts UK prices. This is so self-evident, say some, that the only reasons you could oppose it are ignorance or racism. If that sounds similar to the emotive rhetoric around free movement then it’s because it’s cut from the exact same liberal cloth.
The dream of globalisation, however, has had winners and losers. Many people first saw their “job for life” in manufacturing or textiles disappear overseas. Next they found themselves competing for work at the supermarket with immigrants who don’t have nearly the same overheads. Then the state trimmed the welfare bill to the point where families had to choose between food and heating.
There’s a correlation between areas that experienced high job loss, austerity and voting for Brexit in 2016. What do the free trade Tories now have to say to those people? That globalisation cannot be stopped, so let’s make the most of it? OK. But if the Government signs any trade deal that, say, opens our farms up to US competition, it will prove that free trade is not some force of nature but a political choice – just as it was a choice to let China into the World Trade Organisation, or to privatise and outsource offshore industries.
These decisions have ups and downs, but not every nation has taken the same path. During the passport row, we discovered that France has imposed a state monopoly on the production of its identity documents. Some of the East Asian countries that libertarians point to as future models for Britain have had strict immigration policies or blur the lines between private and state ownership. And even the British pay lip service to the free-market model while preserving politically sensitive monopolies. Or are we suggesting that, post-brexit, Moscow should be able to bid to run the BBC?
In short, if the Government in 2020 proposes, as its Brexit dividend, the complete deregulation of the British economy, continued high migration, a flood of cheap tat that undercuts British producers and the final, total triumph of the services sector over any semblance of dignified human labour, the Conservatives will blow the gains they’ve made in large parts of the country in the past two years. I’d advise against it.
On a hunch, probably only about five per cent of Brexit voters went into the booth thinking Singapore was the future. The rest remember a slogan about taking back control; and if the Government tells them it has pulled them out of the EU only to throw them into the deep waters of global capitalism, they’ll be deeply disappointed. Few would argue for nationalisation or protectionism, but there is certainly a case to be made for a pragmatic economic nationalism that enthusiastically embraces free trade where it’s beneficial to the nation and steps in to take action where it is not. That’s the settlement most fitting with the theme of reasserting national sovereignty.
Nation state democracy is about the representation of constituency: an elected government is supposed to represent its own people, not anyone else’s. And yet the free trade philosophy, taken to its extreme, leads to exactly the same bleeding of sovereignty as we had to the EU, and a myth of elite betrayal that fuels populism. What we’ve only begun to see since the credit crunch is how the radical free-market ethic contradicts not only conservative loyalty to the idea of national constituency but also its desire for public order. The last thing Tories should do is accelerate the forces of upheaval that led to Trump, Corbyn, and, yes, Brexit itself.
The appeal of Global Britain as a way of appeasing critics who say Brexit is Little England nationalism is powerful, but the reality is that for many voters Brexit is indeed a chance for Britain to halt the tide of history and take a few steps back into itself. What’s wrong with that? We’re exhausted. We’ve seen so much change. We’ve grown richer, but less equal and no happier. The country needs to re-establish the fragile ties between state and people, to rethink what really matters.