A handful of remainers cannot let go and, like Jacobites, cling to what they know to be a lost cause because it is part of their identity.
Source - Daily Telegraph - 22/05/21
DANIEL HANNAN
22 May 2021 • 4:00pm
Daniel Hannan
Something became painfully clear this week. The opposition to Britain’s global trade deals is not driven by concern for hill farmers, or fears for the Union, or any economic calculations whatever. It is driven, rather, by Europhile nostalgia; by the desire, perhaps unconscious, for Brexit to fail so that its opponents might be proved right after all.
Most Remainers accepted the referendum result with good grace. But a handful cannot let go and, like Jacobites, cling to what they know to be a lost cause because it has become part of their identity. The paradox is that, in doing so, they have lost touch with the principles that made them support the EU in the first place.
The case for free trade is essentially internationalist. It takes as its starting point the assumption that, if you want to sell me something and I want to buy it, the authorities need a good reason to come between us and hamper our transaction. The fact that you live in another country does not, in itself, qualify as a good reason.
You might think that Euro-integrationists, who like to flaunt their contempt for nationalism, would buy that logic. And plenty of them do. But for some, the issue is now tribal rather than political. Because global trade has Brexity connotations, they have manoeuvred themselves into the extraordinary position of wanting unhindered commerce with the EU but not with anyone else.
When Liam Fox was trade secretary, he commissioned some opinion polls which showed that Brexit had caused a geomagnetic reversal, a polar switch. People who saw themselves as liberal cosmopolitans were suddenly against international trade deals, associating them with Brexit and with the politicians they disliked. Conversely, a certain kind of UKIP voter who used to bang on about the need to protect our strategic industries and grow our own food had become readier to embrace global markets.
Even so, it is extraordinary that anyone should object to restoring our pre-EEC relationship with Australia, a country to which we could hardly be closer in commercial practices, legal norms, accountancy systems, political institutions, regulatory standards, professional qualifications, wage levels or sentimental links.
The electorate at large is enthusiastic about a deal. So, indeed, are the supposedly authoritarian Red Wall voters who are forever being invoked by Tories who want a more statist party. This week, my think tank, the Initiative for Free Trade, polled Conservative supporters in Red Wall constituencies, and found that no fewer than 87 per cent of them backed the free trade agreement with Oz.
In opposing that deal, NFU leaders simultaneously set themselves against public opinion, the Conservative government and (it seems) most farmers – not a comfortable place to be.
How did they get into this mess? It’s hardly as though Australian produce – counter-seasonal to our own, remember – is a threat. As I wrote here last week, 91 per cent of the beef we import comes from the EU and only one per cent from Australia. Yet NFU leaders maintain with straight faces that tariff-free imports are fine from the EU but not from anywhere else.
“I had a briefing call with some NFU lobbyists” an MP who had initially been predisposed to back them told me. “It was just embarrassing. They kept changing their story. They started by claiming that Australian beef was treated with growth hormones, and when an MP pointed out that hormone-treated beef was excluded from the deal, they just shifted ground and moved onto something else.”
The NFU’s Euro-mania sets it apart from the bulk British farmers, most of whom voted Leave. The CBI used to have a similar problem, having alienated many business people, not so much by its opposition to Brexit as by its tribalism on the issue. To its credit, the CBI is trying to repair the damage. Its new leader, Tony Danker, wants to focus on economic growth, and has appealed to Eurosceptics to rejoin.
The NFU has yet to make the equivalent adjustment – which is a pity, because it has an important job to do. It is absolutely right to champion our upland farms. No one wants to see our loveliest countryside degraded. A wiser NFU leadership would be working on ensuring that our systems of direct grants and subsidies go where they are needed. That will genuinely ensure a viable rural economy, in a way that trade protectionism simply won’t.
In parallel, a wiser NFU leadership would be making sure that Britain’s farmers, who are generally more innovative and entrepreneurial than their EU rivals, get their share of the world’s fastest-growing markets, namely those in Asia. It would, in other words, be arguing for more trade, not less.
The NFU’s missteps over the Australia deal are, however, trivial next to the SNP’s. “Yet again, Scotland’s interests have been thrown under the Brexit bus,” said Ian Blackford – which is what he says about pretty much everything these days. But it is almost the precise opposite of the truth. Official analysis shows that, while every part of the UK will benefit from the deal, Scotland (along with London) will gain the most. Australian tariffs on whisky will be removed, and Edinburgh’s financial services will gain access to new markets.
The trade deal, though, is just the start. As the UK deepens its economic relations with the Commonwealth, the Pacific and, in time, the United States, a new regulatory and commercial model will take shape, more open and liberal than those favoured by Beijing or Brussels. Scots will soon be taking advantage of increased opportunities to live and work in other Anglosphere countries. Leaving the UK will come to mean leaving those arrangements.
Boris Johnson put it beautifully on Friday – speaking, appropriately, from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth II in Portsmouth: “It is vital, as a great historic free-trading nation that grew to prosperity thanks to free trade, and thanks indeed to the Royal Navy, that we see these new openings not as threats but as opportunities.”
Quite. Scots, perhaps even more than other Brits, know that fortune lies across the open main. We have always been an ocean-going people. We are not going to change now.
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