Don’t listen to metro-miserablists – Britain can be a champion for free trade
Boris Johnson unveiled his vision for the future of the United Kingdom outside of the European Union yesterday. In the setting of the National Maritime Museum, the Prime Minister cautioned that, in the world economy “the mercantilists are everywhere, the protectionists are gaining ground”. In an era when the United States, the EU, and China are building tariff walls, Boris Johnson declared that the UK would seek to tear them down.
“Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange…as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other. I can tell you in all humility, the UK is ready for that role.”
After an experiment in bloc protectionism between 1975-2020, Britain is now finally rediscovering its free trading heritage. It is recapturing the promise of an economic model which keeps businesses competitive and provides lower prices for consumers – not to mention that free trade lays waste to poverty, lifting populations out of poor living conditions through their own industry.
And yet, some commentators couldn’t resist the urge to seize upon Johnson’s remarks as yet another example of deluded, terrible Britain indulging in delusions of grandeur. The New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe tweeted:
“Important to remember that when a certain sort of Brit says ‘free trade’ he does not it (sic.) in the 21st-century sense but in the 19th century sense: free trade on British terms in sheltered markets, preferably enforced by gunboats.”
He added: “A significant chunk of British economic liberalism is merely nostalgia for a time when Britain could impose its own variety of protectionism on others.”
Cliffe’s remarks are another tired variation on an already well-worn cliché wheeled out by pro-EU pessimists – that Brexit is all about a yearning for Empire. In its snide I-know-so-much-better-than-you tone, it encapsulated everything which is wrong with the brand of metro miserabalism professed by many self-proclaimed liberals.
More importantly, however, it is also historically illiterate. The 19th century liberal tradition was an incredibly vast broad church, including within it strands of anti-imperial, pacific radicalism – such as that of Richard Cobden, who the Prime Minister explicitly referenced in his speech.
Cobden was not a liberal imperialist. He was a profoundly idealistic free trader who believed in the power of commerce to bind peoples together and bring a lasting peace among nations alongside delivering cheap food for the country’s poor. He devoted one part of his life to the anti-Corn Law League, which brought about the repeal of Britain’s protective Corn Laws in 1846. He spent the rest of it promoting swingeing tariff reductions as a close ally of William Gladstone, the most consistently and moralistically anti-imperialist British Prime Minister of the nineteenth century.
To declare that Britain’s rich tradition of free-trading economic liberalism can be reduced only to the imperialism of the British state in this period is highly misleading. Just as it is disingenuous to taint all modern free traders with the charge that they are longing after Empire, Opium Wars, and the British Raj.
It is not a nostalgia for gunboat diplomacy and imperial coercion that motivates the modern rallying cry of free trade. Quite the opposite, it is a yearning for a future in which human governments realise that the interests of their citizens reside not in punitive protections, but in competitive cooperation and trade by comparative advantage.
This was precisely the case made for free trade made by Adam Smith in Chapter Three of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 – that protectionism serves to strengthen producers at the expense of consumers, and raises prices while narrowing choice. Smith’s insight was to expose how high tariffs were the consequence of geopolitical enmities, a “jealousy of trade”, rather than of what we might today call economic justice.
This message rings painfully true in today’s climate, where trade barriers are once again being constructed to the detriment of free trade. For all its merits, the EU’s Customs Union is precisely that – a Union, not a free trading, cosmopolitan institution. It promotes the protection of its producers, and is willing to put up the tariff wall against those who do not comply with the “level playing field”.
In an age in which tariff walls are being rebuilt, Britain is finally reclaiming its heritage as a champion of free trade; and Boris Johnson’s Conservatives can claim with some justification that they are championing the promise of the very principles which British liberals used to hold dear.