Buying British is the first step to success

AT LAST there seems to be some genuine concern in high quarters at the huge sums we spend buying goods from abroad when we could make a perfectly good similar product here at home.

The subject that triggered this reaction is the gigantic quantity of cheap goods flooding in from China. Let us be frank: China has seldom done us any good and at the moment is behaving evilly to its own minority citizens like the Uighurs and brutally towards Hong Kong, which we once ran to mutual benefit.

It is showing expansive aggression on all sides and a territorial imperialism that would have invited the screaming rage of all our Left-wing fanatics if we had ever shown a smidgen of it. Yet we buy hundreds of billions of goods from China, most of it at the very cheap end of the market and the mechanical/electrical stuff, according to my CO, is of dubious reliability. Voices in the media have clamoured that we should buy British first, foreign if need be.

I agree, but if we want to start putting work into British hands – and we are certainly going to need to during our long and coming recovery, we could start with cars.

Motor the streets of Europe and look at the badges of the passing cars. In Germany 90 per cent are German, in France 85 per cent French. Here under 50 per cent are British. Yet our foreign car import bill costs us many billions.We make excellent cars here and could start our economic recovery by ensuring that only very special cars are Europe-made.

Buying British should be a mark of pride. Why isn’t it? And still on

trade, an absolutely vital prop to our recovery, the tireless Liz Truss has applied for us to join the 11 countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

All democracies, they account for 13 per cent of trans-global trade and membership will abolish 95 per cent of tariffs on goods between us. Just a small paragraph

in the centre pages, but it is this sort of news that heralds the first of the justifications for our departing from the EU 13 months ago.

There will be other Free Trade Agreements, which will bring the future prosperity flowing towards us, and it is these that we would have been forbidden by Brussels from joining. Just occasionally striking out on one’s own pays

dividends, but for the main, a shrewd counsel is to go with the flow. More and more this flow is to free trade – the opposite of tariff girdles and protectionism such as binds the members of the EU into a Brussels-directed straitjacket.

When these new sources of trading wealth start to flow in, perhaps our anti-Brexit Remainers will finally shut up.