There is much to lament about Trump’s reckless approach, not least his unsound and punitive formula for calculating tariff rates. But there is a reason we are here: the old trade order plunged millions of working-class Americans into misery and precarity, impelling a decisive share of them to elect Trump twice. As far as they’re concerned, there is no going back to a system that, in the words of United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain, turned once-proud industrial centers into “blast zones”.

Influential pundits such as Matthew Yglesias and prominent Democrats such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis are bent on getting Democrats to reaffirm the superiority of “free trade”. But they are misguided about what this moment calls for. Instead of simply denouncing Trump’s agenda, progressives must stand for a holistic trade policy that reimagines development at home and abroad.

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Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ will fail

By Justin H. Vassallo

Not long ago, progressives were clear-eyed about the fictions and concealed costs of liberalized trade and global economic integration. In the Nineties, labor unions, environmentalists, and anti-sweatshop activists warned against the “race to the bottom” of globalization without basic guardrails to limit pollution and prevent human-rights abuses. Distant, multi-stage supply chains portended ecological damage and the severe coercion of vulnerable foreign workers, including children, while unfettered import competition in an era of shrinking public investment threatened the foundations of working-class security at home.

These concerns usually met with indifference in Washington, despite growing evidence that new trade agreements disproportionately benefited powerful multinationals and were riddled with opportunities for exploitation. Echoing President John F. Kennedy, who believed deeper trade would bolster America’s Cold War alliances, mainstream economists assured that global growth would bring prosperity for all.

It was a utopian promise, backed by technocratic models and clever political stagecraft.

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The benefits, even to the developing world, were overstated. Remove China’s share of the global middle class, and poverty reduction over the last 25 years looks far less encouraging. While there are fewer “least developed countries” today than there were in the year 2000, the World Bank reports that middle-income countries, which include over 60% of the world’s total poor, are struggling to diversify their economies and improve their developmental outcomes.

The main obstacles are becoming more, not less, insurmountable. Although Covid restrictions, a strong US dollar, and higher interest rates have sunk expectations for global growth this decade, the People’s Republic’s massive export dominance is a central factor in this story. The “China Shock” — once thought to be an unfortunate byproduct of US-China trade limited to the American Rust Belt — has spread to other parts of the world, in some cases undermining the transition to advanced manufacturing. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, this has led to what the economist Dani Rodrik calls “premature deindustrialization”. (Notably, this trend has no discernible upside in terms of lower greenhouse-gas emissions, biodiversity, soil health, and potable water.)

On the domestic front, meanwhile, Trump has shrewdly exploited the failure to create good new jobs to replace the ones lost to free trade. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama championed tech-driven global commerce. But the promised jobs boom in tech, professional services, and advanced manufacturing never materialized. Each recession since 1990 has resulted in a so-called jobless recovery, whereby lost skilled work is not made up for through new opportunities in emerging industries. Americans without college degrees, still over 60% of the electorate, are now predominantly underemployed or hold multiple low-wage jobs.

These developments markedly changed the country’s economic geography. While inequality in the United States has always had a distinctly regional dimension in addition to race and gender, globalization has amplified the concentration of economic power by class and zip code, rather than dispersing it. Small industrial cities and rural areas across the Greater Midwest and South have suffered the most, fueling populist resentment.

Conditions aren’t much better for America’s middle class, even within the perimeter of prosperous liberal-leaning metros. A college education — an increasingly unproven ticket to upward mobility — now costs a fortune, and debt-laden graduates have swelled the ranks of precarious service and gig workers since the Great Recession. Rent inflation and the housing shortage have all but transformed major coastal cities — the main engines of growth prior to Covid — into upper-income enclaves.

Deindustrialization and the country’s worsening trade deficit aren’t, in every instance, the direct cause of these crises. Deregulation and weak antitrust enforcement have played their part. But economic hardships stemming from trade policy are interwoven with most of the other factors driving inequality, including shareholder buybacks, short-term profit-seeking, needless tax breaks for the wealthy, and the clout of venture capitalists who increasingly determine when, where, and how business investment happens.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

A progressive trade policy would dramatically overhaul a system that has privileged non-productive investment and upward redistribution. It would rebuild the country’s industrial base and create opportunities in places starved of them. But in sharp contrast to the current administration, such a vision would aim to eliminate financial loopholes, stop the use of tax havens, and enforce the labor, health, environmental, and safety regulations whose absence would revert America to the harsh industrial conditions of the Gilded Age.

Apologists for the new trade war claim that the “one-time price adjustment” Trump is imposing will be soon offset by a rollback of business and environmental regulations, thereby creating more favorable conditions for new factory construction. Their argument rests on this basic equation: excessive regulations have made it even harder for domestic industry to compete with cheap imports, and the regulatory obstacles to new investment outweigh the impact of dramatically raising the cost of foreign inputs and semi-finished goods via tariffs.

Ironically, the “abundance liberals” most vehemently opposed to industrial protectionism tacitly agree with the Trump administration that the permitting process is in desperate need of reform if America is to build more housing, bolster energy independence, and make it easier to grow small and mid-size businesses. To be sure, there are cases of regulatory bottlenecks needlessly delaying or preventing large-scale projects that benefit working-class Americans. Yet it is the broader pattern of outsourcing, short-termism, financialization, and regional disinvestment in worker training — not, say, clean air and safety standards — that are most to blame for the fact that it is impossible to produce an array of tradable goods in America.

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By Lee Seigel

In contrast to a plan which would sacrifice US labor and environmental standards, progressive trade policies would have real teeth when it comes to international standards. Fair-trade advocate Lori Wallach, now director of Rethink Trade, a new think tank, has long maintained that many Left-of-center global policies — carbon restrictions, barriers to trade dumping, and laws against forced labor — amount to targeted tariffs.

This is neither extreme nor a measure of last resort. Sensible tariffs can directly and indirectly buttress a host of standards and norms that Western societies take for granted, and that trade unions over several generations fought for. The goal of trade policy should be to accommodate the right of poorer countries to develop, without undercutting modern taboos against forced labor, servitude, and reckless extraction.

Here, though, would be another opportunity to draw a distinction with Trump’s short-sighted and isolationist tendencies. As opposed to a massive tariff wall, progressives could deploy a mix of carrots and sticks similar to those used to stoke domestic reinvestment. Routine bad actors on child labor, for example, would be excluded from favorable trade relations, and antitrust law could be conceivably wielded against companies that try to circumvent “social” or environmental tariffs. But the US government would also recommit to supporting state capacity, the rule of law, and humane working conditions in countries that aspire to surpass the “millennium development goals” enunciated by the United Nations at the turn of the century.

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That would entail reversing DOGE’s life-threatening cuts to international aid. Yet it would also ideally involve other measures to restore US credibility on the world stage. If America is to repair the damage this administration has already caused, a future progressive government needs to demonstrate unequivocal support for renewable energy abundance (very much including nuclear power), food security, and workers’ rights in developing regions.

In spirit and name, this would be a chance to repudiate the country’s past support for policies which constrained and sometimes crushed movements for economic democracy in the Global South. At the same time, a new progressive trade paradigm must readily eschew the elitism and policy incoherence that have tainted the environmental movement in the eyes of ordinary Americans and working and lower-middle classes across the Atlantic. Following years of austerity, workers need to be assured that a different trade regime combining national economic priorities and global standards will markedly improve their livelihoods and communities, not lower their sights further.

Harmonizing these domestic and international goals has often eluded the US government in the past. The accelerating fallout from Trump’s abysmal international posture promises to make it more difficult still. Progressives, however, have little choice but to recognize the full complexity of trade policy — and to develop solutions to the disappointments and betrayals that have led to this stunning rupture of the postwar order.

Nothing less than global peace, prosperity, and democracy depend on it.

On Liberation Day, international macroeconomists were busy digging out the Project Fear models with which they spectacularly misdiagnosed the economic consequences of both Brexit and the sanctions against Russia. But, really, tariffs are better viewed in terms of longer cycles, as is the case in politics. In the very short run, they constitute a price and output shock, with some characteristics of the economic impact of Covid. The tariffs will raise substantial revenues for the US government this year and next, with industrial relocation playing a progressively more important role in the following two years.

When Tesla invested in Germany, there were two years between the announcement and production actually beginning. But the initial announcement was preceded by a year of evaluation and negotiations. Companies with existing plants are best placed to expand production quickly. Taking stock after three or four years is the preferable way to judge this, and the obsession with year-one effects is the reason why people are misjudging trade-related policy decisions.

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By Yanis Varoufakis

Will Trump get what he wants? In terms of reshoring manufacturing, the answer is probably yes. For the largest trading partners, such as China and Germany, this will be a massive shock because of what it implies for the sustainability of the current economic models. Contrary to predictions, there has not been a compensating dollar revaluation, which open macro models would predict as a market response to tariffs. The unwinding of the globalization Ponzi scheme, which brought increasing capital flows into the US markets, is now clearly the bigger factor.

Politically, these tariffs will work for Trump. Foreign manufacturers are already declaring that they will step up investments in the US. The old manufacturing jobs won’t come back, but new ones will be created. There is, though, a serious risk of a US recession this year if Trump fails to get his tax policies through Congress. The Republicans may lose the midterm elections. But if the goal is to raise external revenues, reduce the budget deficit, and reshore manufacturing, those tariffs will work — so long as one remembers that they cannot do everything at the same time.

Europeans in particular should be wary of wishful thinking. There were plenty of gleeful projections of a more severe impact for the US than for Europe. In the short term, there will be a negative effect on the American economy, as the tariffs are a huge tax on US consumers.

It’s a struggle, though, to see what the EU can do in return. The bloc ran a trade surplus of $230bn last year and the current account surplus against the rest of the world is rising again, back towards the pre-Covid levels, when the euro area adjusted to the sovereign debt crisis by depressing consumption and investment. This is the unsustainable element of the post-Cold War international economic model, along with China’s financial repression. The EU could promise to import more US defense goods, but this would run counter to its strategy of making itself more independent from the US, which should be a more important strategic goal than tariff-avoidance. Nor can the EU simply decide to not buy more LNG from the US. In any case, even if the EU were to make such a promise, the tariffs would only be lifted afterwards.

The EU could decide to reduce its own tariffs, remove quotas, and non-tariff barriers. One example of a non-tariff barrier is the lack of a German highway speed limit. This necessitates a disproportionately high safety standard for cars — a protectionist measure designed to protect the European car industry from imports of cars that cost half as much elsewhere. If the EU were to reduce the direct and indirect tariffs and the quotas on US agricultural products, then we could see a pathway for negotiations. But the US is not going to lift its tariffs in anticipation of future EU action. Those times are over.

What, though, if the EU were to impose a tariff on US services? This is the closest the bloc has to a bazooka — it has a services deficit with the US of roughly half the size as its goods surplus. But a tariff on services is difficult because suppliers can easily evade them, by relocating out of the EU and citizens would push back since there are often no alternatives.

In any case, one of the reasons it would be unwise to predict the economic consequences of yesterday’s decision, is that so much depends on how others react. China, for example, could respond by diverting trade to the EU, and we could end up with a EU-China trade war. Ursula von der Leyen has already ominously said: “We will also be watching closely what indirect effects these tariffs could have, because we cannot absorb global overcapacity nor will we accept dumping on our market.”

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Europe needs a battle plan

By Wolfgang Munchau

So rather than coordinating our retaliation against the US along with those east Asian countries most seriously hit by the tariffs, such as China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam, we will probably go away and fight our own separate trade wars, allowing America to play us off against each other.

If, though, we were to cooperate and attempt to find an alternative to the US financial architecture, security guarantees or the dollar, that would be a genuine problem for Trump. But it’s doubtful that will happen. Instead, the EU finds itself in a position where it is fighting trade wars against both of its trading partners: retaliating against the US — which will inevitably backfire — while also trying to stem Chinese imports.

The EU tariffs on China are, of course, quite different in intention, form, and content from the US ones. But the net effect is a worsening diplomatic relationship with China, and an irreconcilable trade balance. And, so, Europe finds itself between a rock and a hard place. China, and the other countries hit hard by these tariffs, are both necessary partners in organizing a response, and a threat to European industry. Unless a degree of rebalancing is accepted — losing the trade battle to win the trade war — it’s hard to see a way out.

More recently, however, Hayek’s economic ideals have lost their glow in Right-wing circles. Even former Prime Minister Liz Truss, the “free-market fairy godmother”, appears to be faltering, as populist politicians from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni retreat to the comforts of economic nationalism.

At a time like this, it’s worth remembering that the free market wasn’t always betrothed to the Right. In the early days, its advocates could instead be found on the internationalist Left, particularly among the leaders of the transatlantic anti-imperial and peace movements. In 1846, Britain’s Left-wing free traders set a precedent by overturning the protectionist Corn Laws. Overnight, Britain became the first modern free-trade nation.

For Left-leaning intellectuals in the 19th century, global free trade was a moral necessity that augured millenarian visions of a world without want or war. It meant cheap food and a world at peace. Richard Cobden, Britain’s foremost free-trade prophet, believed that free trade would work by “drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace”. He predicted that: “The desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.”

His vision even convinced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, residing in Britain in the 1840s, gave it their cautious approval. They believed that free trade would unite the world’s workers and that it represented the next progressive capitalist step on the path towards socialist revolution. Protectionism, by contrast, was regressive.

Cobden and his fellows assumed that Britain’s inspirational Corn Law reforms would set the world ablaze, initiating a peaceful and prosperous free-trade era. He was sure that industrialising imperial powers would soon follow Britain’s liberal lead. And yet, despite his best efforts, economic nationalism persisted for some time beyond the enlightened borders of Britain. The onset of a global economic depression in 1873 sent Britain’s imperial rivals — most notably the United States, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan — cowering behind ever-higher tariff walls.

As protectionist monopolies and trusts grew in Europe, so did the frenzy for colonisation. Conservative protectionist politicians in the late-19th century were on the lookout for new markets in the hope of exporting surplus capital and exploiting raw materials. The result was the European Scramble for Africa and the carving up of Chinese markets.

Left-wing free traders — a motley international crew of liberal radicals, feminists, Christians and socialists — redoubled their efforts. And in 1879, the liberal radical US political philosopher Henry George published Progress and Poverty, which quickly became an international bestseller. George called for a “single tax” on the estimated value of land that would provide all the revenue that a government required and thereby eliminate all other forms of taxation, including tariffs. As a bonus, the single tax also promised to break up land monopolies the world over. Absolute free trade, prosperity and peace would surely follow.

The single tax movement spread from the US to Britain to the Asia Pacific and Latin America. “The Land Song” became a rip-roaring tune for Edwardian Liberals. Leo Tolstoy believed George’s single tax on land would “usher in an epoch” and dismantle Russian serfdom. Meanwhile, single tax “colonies” were formed across the globe. Lizzie Magie, a turn-of-the-century feminist radical residing in a single tax colony in Arden, Delaware, even invented a board game to teach about the evils of land monopoly: Monopoly.

With the dawn of the 20th century, socialist internationalists increasingly worked alongside their liberal radical capitalist comrades to overturn the protectionist imperial order. Political parties including the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party of America and Germany’s Social Democratic Party explicitly endorsed free trade. And influential German Marxist theorists such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky found themselves in agreement with socialist internationalists such as Japan’s Toyohiko Kagawa, Britain’s Bertrand Russell and Crystal Eastman in the USA.

Yet it was still an uphill battle. In his bestselling book, The Great Illusion (1910), British journalist Norman Angell sought in vain to warn nationalistic politicians and businessmen that, because the world had become so interdependent, nobody could win from war, not even the so-called victors. When the First World War inevitably broke out, Left-wing free traders blamed it on the rise of economic nationalism and colonial expansion since the 1870s.

The horrors of war galvanised support for free trade, partly through the international women’s peace movement. As these “mothers of the world” saw it, women and children suffered most during trade wars and military conflicts. Their aim was therefore to democratise foreign policymaking further to curb men’s tendency towards economic nationalism and war. And they supported free trade because it meant that women and children would no longer go hungry. For them, free trade meant food security.

Take Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer and figurehead of the interwar women’s peace movement, who had witnessed horrific scenes of starvation during her tour of south-eastern Europe in 1921, three years after the Great War had ended.  She noted how “food resources which were produced in Europe itself and should have been available” weren’t because “a covert war was being carried on” through “import duties and protective tariffs”, as these small European states erroneously “imitated the great Allies with their protectionist policies, with their colonial monopolies and preferences”.

The winds of change finally began to blow once a free trader, Tennessee’s Cordell Hull — “Richard Cobden reincarnated” — became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and went about liberalising US and world trade during the Thirties and Forties. He believed that a free-trade world could only be effectively maintained by subordinating national sovereignty, thereby keeping nations from falling into the same economic nationalist trap that had led to two world wars and a worsening global depression. With the support of his Left-wing globalist allies, he laid the groundwork for the United Nations and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), which became the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

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After Hull left the US state department, the Left-wing free traders became outsiders once again. They quickly lost their influence over the GATT, which during the Cold War became more beholden to the profit-seeking demands of multinational corporations than to the workers and consumers of the world. And their envisaged Pax Economica, seemingly within their grasp in the late Forties, looked ridiculous against the Manichean backdrop of the Cold War.

Over time, conservative Western governments grew more receptive to freeing global markets. But rather than enlisting the help of Left-wing free traders, they turned instead to anti-communist economic thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Hayek. With paranoid cold warriors seeing “red” everywhere, democracy from the Left came to be seen as an impediment to free trade, rather than its accompaniment. This led to a series of Western-backed coups d’état and military interventions in the name of defending free-market capitalism.

Bertrand Russell, British socialist free trader, philosopher, and peace worker, perhaps portended the fate of the Left-wing free-trade movement a century ago when he wrote: “It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.” Yet perhaps, with Right-wing populists trampling over free-trade ideals, the time is ripe for a comeback.

Fragments of the movement remain hidden in plain sight. They can still be found within regional integration projects including the EU and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and in Fair Trade’s moralistic global vision that prioritises economic justice over corporate profits. But today’s Left-wing internationalists cannot hope to forge a new Pax Economica without first reclaiming their history from the ideological citadels of the Right.

One of the UK’s poultry producers’ associations reported last autumn that between bird flu and persistently low margins, up to a third of its members either reduced production or closed down altogether. One former egg farm near me now rents storage units; another has been on the market for months, unable to find a buyer. As a result, there aren’t enough eggs to stock the shelves — and supermarkets are importing them from Italy. “So what?” you might ask. This is the market at work. But around this time three years ago, egg politics looked for a moment as though they might be on a different course.

Covid lockdowns scrambled many of the food supply chains we’d grown accustomed to — and as the country reeled, it seemed briefly as though more local networks might begin to re-emerge. (This was the point we first got our birds, albeit less with profit in mind than our own kitchen.) On my street, neighbours with back-garden poultry did a roaring trade.

Early 2020 brought a wider sense, too, that Covid might signal the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks. But three years on, although my street still has several poultry-keepers, most have reverted to buying eggs from the shops. The turn away from free trade, if the Italian egg suppliers are anything to go by, has yet to occur.

Why, then, do we seem unable to imagine any other way of doing things? This seemingly inexorable drift back to the impersonal market epitomises Britain’s approach to food. This system, which we embraced in earnest nearly two centuries ago, maps a belief in the impersonal logic of “the market” onto a terrain whose most important attributes are simply not visible to market logic. And egg politics shows, in microcosm, just how poorly this ideology meshes with food production — to the extent that it now threatens our capacity to produce food at all.

Our trajectory toward the current situation was set out by Karl Polanyi, in the influential 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Humans, Polanyi argues, have always bought, sold, and exchanged things. But for the most part, across time and cultures, the market has been ordered to the needs of social institutions, and regulated accordingly. What’s unique about the modern world, he suggests, is that it works the other way round: our social institutions are ordered to the market.

For Polanyi, it was the enclosure of the commons that set England on this trajectory, by displacing England’s subsistence peasants, and creating the industrial proletariat, who were obliged to work for a wage. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for that older, landowning order was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws: tariffs that aimed to protect domestic grain prices from the influence of cheaper foreign imports, and were vigorously opposed by the mercantile class and industrial proletariat.

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It was, in effect, a contest between Britain’s food producers and an emerging population of food consumers. And in 1846, the food producers lost their protection from competition. The change accelerated Britain’s shift from a farming-first to an industrial economy, and set agriculture — once the largest employer in England — on the trajectory it’s followed ever since: dwindling opportunities for youth, relentless demands for efficiency, and with these a bitter tension between land stewardship, and market-driven pressure to lower standards. The historian Robert Ensor writes that after repeal, “the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it”. Many smaller farmers gave up, and emigrated to America.

As populations urbanised, this also pushed Britons to abandon domestic poultry-keeping — or rather, to centralise it. Today, most egg farming (where it survives at all) is highly industrialised, with 48% of British birds in battery cages. Despite more recent regulations banning the cruellest intensive farming practices, bird welfare often suffers. And their waste, though an excellent nutrient for our domestic veg beds, is a major source of river pollution at scale.

Perhaps the gains in efficiency warrant the loss of chicken-keeping culture. But chicken centralisation also illustrates how, when market pressures collide with food production, it’s not so much that costs are driven down. Rather, they’re externalised into areas that don’t appear on the balance sheet, such as animal cruelty, river pollution, distressed producers — or, more subtly, disappearing cultures.

We’re middle-class chicken hobbyists, not farmers, but even amateur poultry-keeping has left me wondering what else is lost in cultural terms when chickens are centralised, from realism about animal behaviour, to poultry-based metaphors — or seasonal rituals. Absent modern, artificial housing conditions, many hens stop laying over the winter. If your birds are free-range, when they start again in the spring, you have to figure out where they’re hiding their eggs. When I learned this, it left me wondering whether this insight survives for most modern families only in the other egg glut we’re eating our way through: the chocolate one. Modern chocolate was, after all, invented the year after the Corn Laws were repealed. So Britain’s urbanisation began in earnest just as chocolate became a mass-market treat. Did a trace of the older form of “spring egg hunt” —  for real eggs — urbanise, too, in chocolate form, among now-henless households?

The nineteenth-century Tories were ambivalent about such losses: the Corn Law debate split the Tory Party down the middle, and eventually forced Robert Peel’s resignation as Prime Minister. But despite their residual association in the public mind with the interests of landowners, today’s Tory Party seems closer in spirit to the old Whigs: mercantilist to the core, and deeply reluctant to look too closely at how well “markets” manage the complex mesh of social, environmental and economic issues bound up in domestic food production.

When, for example, Johnson struck a “free trade deal” with Australia around two years ago, it was hailed as a benefit of Brexit. At the time, the National Farmers’ Union warned that the proposed deal would be disastrous for British farmers; Johnson shrugged it off with a merrily Whiggish nod to market ideology, declaring: “This is a country that grew successful and prosperous on free trade, on exporting around the world.”

Last year, British farmers warned again that, applied to farming, these free-market policies are “sleepwalking” Britain into a food crisis. In January, shop shelves across the country stood empty. The government shrugged, this time blaming supermarkets for “market failure”. More recently, food tsar Henry Dimbleby quit his post, condemning ministers’s “ultra-free-market ideology” as a threat to Britain’s food security.

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But the ideology seems as tenacious as ever, and our leaders as convinced at ever that where the dictates of the market require that something be dissolved — even if that turns out to be Britain’s capacity to produce eggs at all — then it will be dissolved. We don’t need poultry producers in Britain. The market will provide: we’ll just import eggs.

But this is premised on a belief that nothing can stand in the way of international trade, now or in the future. And even leaving aside energy prices, just based on news headlines over the last 20 years, this strikes me as — to put it mildly — a risky bet. What if we grind domestic food security to nothing in the name of the “free market”, only for the wheels to come off global trade again?

And yet nor am I sure that this is just a matter of ideology-blinded mercantilist leaders. For all proposed solutions to food security — whether free-market ones from the Right, or regulatory or veganism-based ones from the Left — share the same implicit certainty that whatever the solution is, it will still involve centralisation. And yet we could surely make a dent in the nested (sorry) poultry problems of food security, pricing, pollution, welfare, and carbon-intensive supply chains — not to mention improve domestic food waste management — by going the opposite way, toward chicken decentralisation.

Yes, some people live in apartments. But 87% of British homes have a back garden. And regulations on intensive poultry farming permit an insane density of birds — 17 hens per square metre — meaning even a tiny back garden could easily keep a few hens in many times this space, while enabling the recycling of kitchen scraps and supplying the garden with high-quality fertiliser.

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So why aren’t we doing this? I don’t think it’s just that Tories are wicked mercantilists, or that the farmers are almost gone already. The only explanation I can see is simple, and dispiriting: that however excited some got in 2020 about re-localising and de-marketising food production, the vast majority of people just don’t want to.

The fault, in truth, lies with all of us: for market “efficiency” and “convenience” isn’t just about price and choice. It’s also about lack of obligation. As I’ve learned when buying (and, occasionally, selling) eggs among neighbours, the moment you make trade more local — which is to say, more personal — you swiftly become caught in additional layers of obligation, whether to the birds that depend on you for food and safety, or to the neighbours whose subsistence is now (in however tiny a way) more bound up in yours.

And while communitarians often idealise such networks, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to buy eggs without this layer of complexity. No one who views taking the neighbour’s bin round as a huge favour will be keen on re-creating this complexity unless they absolutely have to. Most are still more than happy to look away from the uncounted welfare, ecological and food-security costs of this freedom from obligation. And I suspect it’s this, more than anything, that explains our Titanic-like drift toward the iceberg of food supply disaster.

Changing course would not just mean kicking out the Tories, or fiddling with regulations, embracing synthetic foods, or even re-building forgotten practices in domestic food production. It would mean re-evaluating every basic assumption about how we relate to one another, and why. The food crisis will have to get a great deal more severe — and fresh eggs a great deal more expensive than mass-produced chocolate ones — before many are willing to do that.

This order was in retreat even before the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Total international merchandise trade peaked in 2008, when it accounted for 51% of the world’s output. It plummeted during the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and has never durably recovered. The Great Recession, and the widening disparity between rich and poor that followed, shattered the belief that a global world of free trade was bringing prosperity to all.

Prior to the crash, “protectionism” had been a dirty word for 30 years. In the 2010s, however, Donald Trump and likeminded politicians elsewhere bid for power by calling on their countrymen to embrace a protectionist future. In America, Trump wanted to reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing base and multiply the number of good jobs. He also wanted to reserve such jobs for American citizens rather than offer them to foreigners, often non-whites who came, Trump alleged, from “shithole countries”.

Suspicion of foreigners facilitated Trump’s victory in 2016, as it did Brexit’s triumph. By the late 2010s, hostility to non-European peoples was on the rise even in the cosmopolitan EU, prompting Germany to pay Turkey and Greece billions to park tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and North African refugees in camps far from the European heartland.

All these forces were in motion before the twin crises of the pandemic and Ukraine struck. The pandemic froze populations in place, stalling migration as severely as world wars had once done. Meanwhile, the vast disruption of the most mundane processes of manufacturing, commerce, and transportation undermined the “just-in-time” global production and shipping regimes that had long undergirded the neoliberal economy. All kinds of essential goods (and essential workers) were suddenly scarce, the algorithms used to finely tune supply and demand now rendered useless. Corporations everywhere began to wonder whether stretching their supply chains around the world was still a good idea, especially when a little virus and a nasty regional war could stop the global mobility of goods and people cold.

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By Aris Roussinos

The response of Europe and America to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveals not just shock and horror at Putin’s savagery but a determination to restore a neoliberal world order that had been slipping away. Europe and America have rapidly been repairing a frayed Atlantic alliance. They have revived the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941, that called for restoring the values and principles that the Nazis were so intent upon destroying: the rule of law, respect for the territorial integrity of nations, the right of peoples to be free and self-governing, and the pursuit of economic prosperity through peace and trade rather than war and conquest.

Even Western measures against Russia are aimed at reviving the world of yesterday. The sanctions are, indeed, among the most severe and comprehensive ever imposed on a country. In the West’s most desirable scenario, Putin will be weakened to the point where he must retreat or see his regime implode. That would potentially revive Russian liberalism and put the country on a path that would culminate in its eventual reintegration into a neoliberal global community.

Will Europe and America succeed in this endeavour? One hopes so. But they may not. The circumstances that would trigger Putin’s fall or a quick end to the conflict have yet to crystallise. It seems more likely that the conflict will become a frozen war, with Ukraine becoming the new Korea — divided not between North and South but between East and West, with Ukraine pulled more and more into the “West” as South Korea once was. In this scenario, Russia, with a sliver of eastern Ukraine in its possession, would become more like North Korea: isolated, authoritarian, and poor, yet possessing a dangerous nuclear arsenal and with China as a silent but steadfast ally.

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If this darker scenario comes to pass, the world’s retreat from the neoliberal world of the early years of this century may intensify. During the golden age of neoliberalism, corporations and nations felt confident procuring raw materials and implanting production facilities anywhere, as long as resources were abundant, labour was cheap, and markets were allowed to flourish. Establishing outposts of free-market capitalism in countries such as Russia and China, it was hoped, would compel the regimes of those nations to liberalise: to institute the rule of law (if only to protect property and contracts), to embrace a free press and free elections, and maybe even to embrace democracy itself. Open markets, it was hoped, would produce open societies.

It is now clear that these hopes were misplaced. Globalisation has strengthened authoritarianism and illiberalism, not weakened them. We may be moving into a world that is not open, flat or harmonious, but fractured and divided into rival geopolitical blocs: Russia at the centre of one, China, Europe, and America at the centre of the others. Tall, jagged, and hard-to-scale walls may separate these blocs from each other. Peace would be achievable in this multipolar world, and alliances certainly would be possible — between North America and Europe, for example, or between Russia and China. But war would be a recurring threat, rendering the movement of goods, capital, and people between the various blocs far more fraught than during the neoliberal order’s heyday.

If the world continues to shift toward multipolar antagonism, geopolitics and national security will become paramount in the planning not just of nations but of private corporations. EU members are now discussing how to sustain their economies long term without access to Russian oil or gas. Multinational corporations must now grapple not simply with the cost of pulling out of Russia, which has been high, but with the possibility that a far more serious blow will befall them if China should decide to attack its own Ukraine, known to us as Taiwan. It is no longer inconceivable that international corporations will be forced to pull out of China as they’ve had to pull out of Russia. How does a corporation insulate itself against the worst consequences of that future?

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National governments thus have to think much harder about the costs, economic and political, of sustaining raw material, production, and supply chains stretched across vast territories and rival blocs. Sovereign states are compiling lists of goods, such as computer chips, deemed so essential to national security that they must be produced domestically or in a friendly neighbouring state. Though military budgets will likely balloon, a military strategy alone will not suffice. Countries will require an industrial strategy, too, which means governments will need to intervene in markets in ways considered illegitimate during the era when the neoliberal order was riding high.

These may not be the long-term results of the Ukraine crisis. Liberalism may triumph, and a neoliberal political economy may be resuscitated. But such a victory will not come easily. And even if one is achieved, the neoliberal economic order cannot successfully be restored for the long term without a serious reckoning with its flaws: a toleration of too great a level of economic and social inequality; a reluctance to recognise and assist those who have suffered economically; and a flow of political power away from national legislatures and toward international organisations, private and public. It will not be enough, in other words, simply to reanimate the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, or of the WTO. Nations and alliances need new charters for the twenty-first century, ones adequate to the challenges of our time.

I am not starry-eyed about rural Britain or the state of farming. My last book, English Pastoral, was about the mess we’re in and why. We seem unable to understand — or care enough about — creating food systems that reconcile farming with nature. There is, whether we want to hear it or not, a collapse in farmland biodiversity. Since more than 70% of Britain is farmed, that collapse is devastating. And yes, a lot of this happened under the EU’s frequently barmy Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

We got into our current mess by copying the intensive farming methods of other countries after WWII: hyper-specialisation; mono-cultures; ending mixed rotational farming; making fields ever bigger; using artificial nutrients, herbicides and insecticides; over-ploughing; and separating animal livestock into intensive systems that are grain or soy-based — all propped up with an armoury of medicines, wormers and insecticides.

We took some of the edges off these policies by being in the EU, which regulated and constrained our agriculture (it was quick to ban antibiotics as growth promoters, for example — something that’s still legal in the US). For better or worse, we now have farming standards and sensibilities aligned with the EU.

Post-Brexit, we had a choice. Would we ask British farmers to compete with the rest of the world on equal terms — or not? Competing on equal terms under free trade would mean we’d have to follow the methods of other countries — probably of the world’s most intensive farming landscapes.

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But we wanted something better on our islands. We were told that Brexit could be “green”, with farmers protected and rewarded for working with nature, not against it. We were told repeatedly by the Government that it wouldn’t sign trade deals that would allow imports of food produced in systems with lower standards. We were told that allowing them was unfair and would undermine efforts here to do better. Our farmers, we were told, would be asked to do exceptional things — and supported, but not through the blunt EU tool of propping up farmer incomes.

Many farmers were up for that. I was one of them. On our farm in the Lake District, we’re planting 25,000 trees, restoring three miles of hedgerow, restoring our old wildflower hay meadows, re-wiggling rivers and creating wetlands.

It is possible to find sensitive ways to produce great food, while helping repair nature in the British landscape. But when we signed the trade deal with Australia, we killed this idea stone dead. Now, we are asking British farmers to compete with Australian farmers on equal terms of free trade — regardless of the impact that competition might have. Regardless of their production methods and systems.

Welfare and environmental standards are completely different in Australia. According to the RSPCA, Australian farmers are legally allowed to keep hens in battery cages and sows in stalls. They can feed hormones to and hot-brand their cattle and take the skin off sheep in a practice called “mulesing” (perhaps don’t Google it). Of course, Australians can make their own rules and live by them, and you can make your own mind up about each of these practices. Not all Australian farms use them, but that’s not the point. The point is that all of these things are legal in Australia and banned in Britain.

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The problem is not that Australian farmers are terrible or have an awful product. I’ve been on many Australian farms. They are fine people, and some are exceptional farmers (I have learnt a lot from them). They operate in an entirely different ecological and economic context, and the British people have a different sensibility about key issues. There is no credible defence for allowing foreign farmers to import their produce into our country, when they can undercut us by farming beneath standards we insist on here. Especially if this fact is then hidden from shoppers by vague labelling, or hidden in processed or cooked foods.

No one wants our farmers to achieve the scale of Australian sheep farms. The British landscape can’t scale up enough to compete, without grave damage to its remaining biodiversity. Ideally, we need a landscape of small fields with hedges, wildflowers, grasses, scrub and trees — which allow our native flora and fauna to thrive. There is no doubt that we can feed ourselves well from better farming, if we get serious about it and support it.

But this week British farmers realised that, for all the “green” talk, we are now being asked to do more (not less) of the things that got us into our current mess. Get big. Get efficient. Or get out.

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There is, theoretically, an emerging system (called “Environmental Land Management Schemes” or ELMS) that might reward farmers for promoting public goods — nature — alongside their farming. But in practice it is nowhere to be seen, probably highly bureaucratic, and almost certainly lowers the income of farmers relative to the old CAP system — therefore increasing the pressures to exploit land more, not less.

The problem is ideological — it is all based on a misunderstanding that we can be as “efficient” as North America on our productive land and have nature round the edges. We can’t. We actually need patchwork mixed farming landscapes that replicate our native ecosystems. Farming intensification robs us of that. This isn’t debatable, it is the ecological truth.

In the wake of the Australian free trade agreement, we will be told the usual nonsense about cheapening food for the poorest in our society. (The people who say this don’t care two hoots about poverty in any other context.) In reality, cheapening food is more often a mask for the horrific cheapening of labour, and a sop for people caught on the wrong end of systemic inequalities. Let the plebs eat KFC — but for God’s sake don’t raise taxes and redistribute wealth.

This should be seen for what it is. A displacement. A scam. A government that won’t put its own land and its people first isn’t worthy of the name. It is little more than a self-serving ideological cult.

Farmers are drawing a simple and obvious conclusion: intensify or die. And this is a disaster for the British landscape: a total, unmitigated disaster that will unfold over the years.

Perhaps worst of all, for me, is that this deal has killed support among farmers for higher welfare and ecological standards and regulation. I can’t win that argument with my farming friends now — not now they’re unprotected from being undercut by imports. They say, “We are competing with lower standards … We don’t run fucking butterfly farms”. Sadly, they have to do what they have to do, and we will all be the poorer for it.

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather,“its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all. 

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal. 

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As the political scientists Duncan Bell and Srdjan Vucetic note in a 2019 paper on the CANZUK project, sober analysis of the geographic facts underwriting trade patterns reveals “why Australian exports to Britain have for decades hovered below two percent of its total outgoing trade and why only for New Zealand would a CANZUK pact count as ‘the most important’” This, they note, partly “explains why during the Brexit campaign, the leaders of all of the CANZUK countries supported Britain remaining in the EU. They do not see the huge benefits professed by CANZUKers.”

In any case, what good would it do us if Australia sells huge quantities of raw materials to China, or Canada agricultural produce to America, if the UK exchequer doesn’t benefit from it? Would we share the same currency? Would there be a shared tax mechanism to convert this notional $6 trillion GDP into something meaningful? The issue is not even raised, let alone answered.

Yet the example of the EU already shows us the failure of economic union without political union; and of advancing a common foreign policy among nations with different interests. Without an overarching political and economic framework, the goal of uniting separate nations into one coherent geopolitical bloc cannot succeed; and even with one, as long as the interests of the component nations diverge, the long-term chances of success are slim. The only meaningful economic effect of a CANZUK free trade zone, surely, would be to wipe out what remains of British farming under tides of Canadian wheat, Australian beef and New Zealand lamb. 

On the strategic level, the MP Bob Seeley, in a report for the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society thinktank, proposes “a mutual defence clause, akin to NATO’s Article 5”. But on the matter of defence, again the stumbling block is not the individual fellow-feeling and affection shared between the Anglo-Saxon nations but the differing foreign policy goals of CANZUK’s constituent countries. Would Australia send jets to defend the North Sea from Russian incursions? Would avowedly anti-nuclear New Zealand, an essentially pacifist state with barely any armed forces to speak of, demand a place under the UK’s nuclear umbrella, or raise an army to defend Canada’s oil exploration rights in the high Arctic?

As Bell and Vucetic note, “it is illusory to think that an alliance with Britain would ever again become Australia’s main strategic priority, just as it is illusory to expect that Canada and the UK would re-orient their defence postures away from the Atlantic and towards the Asia-Pacific region.

Roberts claims that “Churchill would have approved” the CANZUK scheme, but his previous attempts at viewing foreign policy through a Churchillian lens have not been successful. On the wisdom of invading Iraq, I suspect not even the objects of his adulation would agree with his previous assertions that “history will prove George Bush right”, nor that Tony Blair’s “apotheosis” will come “when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam’s henchmen”.

But as a useful thought experiment in this mooted superpower’s foreign policy, what would the CANZUK position on invading Iraq have been anyway? Neither Canada nor New Zealand took part in the war, which they strongly opposed, judging that the invasion was not in their national interests. Perhaps a more useful Churchillian lesson would have been the Chanak Crisis of 1921, when Canada refused to follow Britain into war against Turkey to Churchill’s great disappointment, and which established the principle that the dominions would from then on follow their own independent foreign policies — a principle even more apparent now than it was a century ago. 

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More bold claims for a united CANZUK foreign policy have been offered recently by Matt Kilcoyne of the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, who argues that “common language, common political systems, common history, common sense of purpose, translate into a sheer force of fact re-emergence of a global role that has eluded the mandarins in the Foreign Office for far too long.” Explicitly echoing the civilisation-state rhetoric of China, Russia and Turkey, Kilcoyne claims that the CANZUK nations are themselves a civilisation-state, with that civilisation being globalised capitalism. “Our civilisation needs champions to save it from opponents and challengers abroad, but also nationalists at home,” he asserts (presumably referring to the voters who brought Johnson’s government to power), vowing that “we must defend the gains of globalisation for the whole of the world”. 

This is a vision of Anglo-Saxon civilisation purely reducible to swashbuckling free trade on the high seas previously made only by Napoleon or Oswald Spengler at their most cynical and dismissive, though here represented as a positive trait. Wrapping neoliberal economic goals within a narrative of derring-do and imperial nostalgia derived from Ladybird’s Adventures From History series may make a subset of middle-aged Brexiteers go weak at the knees, but a zealous adherence to free trade dogma does not make a civilisation, even if, as we are rapidly finding out, it may well break one.

If the argument is that doubling down on the economic theories which have done so much to destroy British manufacturing and boost Chinese power at the expense of the West will somehow restrain China’s growth, then it is self-evidently absurd. Having handed the world on a platter to China in pursuit of globalisation, we are now told to deepen globalisation to fight China. Far from an Anglospheric superpower, a CANZUK along these lines would be simply a transcontinental suicide pact.

As for what a united CANZUK foreign policy of confronting China would mean in practice, Kilcoyne cites the fact that “Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom joined the USA in condemning moves to shut down free and fair elections in Hong Kong this autumn”, as indeed they did; and if foreign policy were simply a question of co-signing petulant letters, no doubt CANZUK would indeed be a superpower.

However, foreign policy and grand strategy entails far more than this in the real world, and in the real world, the primary defence relationship of each CANZUK Nation is with the United States, and not with each other, and the primary focus of each nation is its own continental sphere. In defence as with trade, Britain remains a European power, Australia and New Zealand retain their focus on Asia, and Canada on North America and the Arctic: and these basic orientations will not change, whatever the dreams of a certain subset of Westminster thinktankers. 

A more limited argument in favour of enhanced cooperation among the CANZUK nations could reasonably be made — indeed, it is a common approach of the cheerleaders to elide support for their more realistic goals with that for their grander geostrategic fantasies.

Liberalisation of visa regulations among the CANZUK nations would no doubt be broadly popular; similarly, a more realistic proposal for diplomatic cooperation on the world stage between Britain, Canada and Australia has been put forward by the journalist Ben Judah. He correctly notes that New Zealand’s foreign policy does not chime with the others, as “Wellington is simply not in the same place as Ottawa, Canberra, or London when it comes to China”, and “New Zealand sees itself as neutral in U.S.-China competition”. Cooperation could well be considered on shared defence procurement issues, though again, Australia, the UK and Canada expect to fight wars in very different environments for very different goals, so even here a degree of scepticism must enter the conversation. 

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Given the vast disparity between the economic and foreign policy realities and the grand claims of the CANZUK enthusiasts, what are we to make of this sudden reflorescence of ideas first proposed, and then swiftly abandoned as unrealistic, at the height of Britain’s Edwardian golden age? The historians  Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce note in Shadows of Empire, their recent book on the Anglosphere, that “it is advocates of a free market, neo-liberal future for the UK who remain its most enthusiastic champions”, and that as the UK’s attachment to Europe soured, “the gravitational pull of the Anglosphere on the political imagination of neo-liberal Eurosceptics intensified”. 

“Politicians, commentators and think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, which had long-established transatlantic ties with Washington counterparts such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, began to publish pamphlets, speeches and blogs making the case for Brexit,” they note, which “reimagined Britain as a freewheeling, globally networked economy, striking trade deals with the USA, Canada and an expanded Asian and Australasian Anglosphere.”

Despite the overlap of personnel between these neoliberal ideologues and the Leave campaign, the campaign to exit the European Union consciously chose not to stand on a platform of Anglospheric neoliberalism. It correctly perceived that few in the Leave vote’s core areas share Kilcoyne’s perception of globalisation in which “the empirics of a world made richer, with more choice, happier, freer, more tolerant people, engaged in commerce with others right across the world would be obvious to all”. Who in the Red Wall clamours to keep the South China Sea safe for globalisation? Where is the popular demand to rework Britain’s constitutional order around neoliberal economics? This is, after all, precisely the worldview most Brexit voters were casting a defiant vote against. 

As Pearce and Kenny note, “a neo-Thatcherite idea of Brexit, which involves stripping away tariff barriers, reducing labour market and product regulations, and trading at ‘world prices’ remains a potentially toxic position to present to a public weary of austerity, facing years of declining living standards, and increasingly jaded in the face of the economic liberalism associated with the last few decades of government.” Aware of the absolute unpopularity of their ideology with British voters, neoliberals have tweaked their offering by dressing it up in dashing Edwardian garb.

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There is a danger that Johnson, with his fatal weakness for bombastic and absurd ideas, will hear the siren song of Westminster’s new Empire League; but this will be counterbalanced by his just as powerful ambition to remain in power, shoring up his fragile electoral coalition by giving his new working-class voters what they want, and not what neoliberal thinktankers demand they must suffer. This scheme is literally the work of an elite, and not a popular one. Everything about the EU that Red Wall voters hated, this would multiply.  

In any case, is there any meaningful support for CANZUK in its other mooted constituent nations? The CANZUK blogosphere asserts so, but — as is a recurring pattern here — this very much depends on which shifting definition is used. Certainly, a number of right-wing current and former politicians in Canada, New Zealand and Australia support a free trade agreement among the CANZUK nations, along with some form of free movement between them. Support for free movement, free trade and an undefined “security coordination” among the CANZUK nations is now a policy platform of Canada’s opposition Conservative party, but this is far from the federal superpower of Roberts’ imagining. 

CANZUK evangelists cite the Australian senator Eric Abetz as a supporter, but his explicit insistence that “this would absolutely not be a political union”, and that “I wouldn’t want a CANZUK Human Rights court which would determine what Australia or New Zealand parliaments can legislate”, again shows the limitations of the idea’s appeal even to its own supporters.

New Zealand’s leader, Jacinda Ardern, has expressed no interest in the idea whatsoever, though her coalition partner in the rightwing populist New Zealand First party supports free trade and movement, as does the leader of New Zealand’s opposition New Zealand National party, though again both are silent on the wider strategic aspirations of CANZUK’s true believers.

Similarly, Australia’s former leader Tony Abbott has expressed support for free trade and free movement among the CANZUK nations, and again, is silent on the wider geopolitical aspects. Support for the idea even in its most nebulous form is hardly unanimous among the ranks of Australia’s former prime ministers. Kevin Rudd, writing for The Guardian, has described CANZUK as “utter bollocks” and “the nuttiest of the many nutty arguments that have emerged from the Land of Hope and Glory set now masquerading as the authentic standard-bearers of British patriotism”. 

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The issue here is, as the political scientists Ben Wellings and Helen Baxendale note, that “in eschewing the type of institutional set-up that characterizes the EU, the success of the Anglosphere appears to rest on the existence of a constellation of like-minded politicians in English-speaking countries”. As long as the Antipodean and Canadian equivalents of Daniel Hannan or the other neoconservative and neoliberal occupants of the wilder fringes of British conservatism are in power, then the idea may seem viable, “but such alignments are ephemeral”.

A loose alliance dependent on the vagaries of four different electoral cycles for its very existence is clearly not a stable prospect. In any case, as Pearce and Kenny observe, generally speaking “the other core countries of the Anglosphere … remain indifferent to — or simply perplexed by — calls for some kind of formalised Anglosphere alliance.”  

Much of what is achievable is harmless, and may even bring a modest good; that which is actively dangerous is fortunately unlikely to be achievable. As a proposal to amplify Britain’s diplomatic reach, it is worth considering, though in any case it is Australia and Canada who have more to gain from sharing our UN seat than we do.

Easier movement between the CANZUK nations may well be popular, though the significantly differing immigration policies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia would present a barrier, whatever the strength of fellow feeling between the mother country and the dwindling proportion of the former colonies’ citizens who claim descent from these islands. How long the residual emotional pull of Britain’s political and cultural inheritance will survive the changing demographics of the former dominions is an open question. 

Eager to shy away from accusations of racial discrimination in choosing Britian’s former white colonies for political union over the rest of the Commonwealth, CANZUK’s adherents seem to advance the notion that the people of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are, whatever their origin, somehow metaphysically British, like those of Hong Kong, due to their adherence to Westminster-style governance and free trade dogma. But this is a shaky foundation on which to build a political union. Indeed, the very survival of the United Kingdom itself as a single political unit is looking shakier than it has at any time since its founding, and CANZUK’s evangelists would do better to worry about the continued existence of their own country before planning unions with other nations on the furthest corners of the globe. 

But it is as a Trojan horse to smuggle in failed and wildly unpopular economic belief-systems under the banner of imperial nostalgia that CANZUK’s neoliberal fantasies will have to be rejected. That these wild dreams are even entertained by MPs of the governing party only highlights the irreconcilable tensions within the Brexit vote, and the fragility of the Conservative Party’s hold on power.

They are useful only to show how far Whiggish fantasies have penetrated into British conservatism; and how bereft the ideologues are, perhaps fortunately for the national good, of meaningful or achievable ideas. Perhaps it is for the best that they are distracted by such a fanciful project, as long as it prevents them from doing more damage to this country than their harmful economic dogma has already achieved.

Beef stood for courage, manliness and the fighting spirit; indeed, as Ben Rogers mentions in his sparkling book on the subject, Georgian British sailors consumed a ration of over 200 pounds of beef a year. It also stood for freedom, the independence of landowner and smallholder and tenant. In those marbled veins ran the blood of John Bull, the political antidote to the pettifogging high-taxing Whiggish government and the corrupt effeminate Hanoverian court.

To be a Tory, then and now, was and is to believe in these two things: beef and liberty. We like eating cows and we don’t like big government. What wasn’t an issue then, however, but is now, is the question of where the cows come from.

Among the many reasons for supporting Brexit were the freedom us to manage our own countryside, and the ability to negotiate international commerce for ourselves. So last week the Agriculture Bill passed the Commons, the first proper piece of agricultural legislation for 50 years. And coming down the track are the trade deals we can now strike with other countries.

But these two fruits of emancipation are in tension. The Agriculture Bill’s purpose was to protect the environment, ensure high standards of domestic food production, and improve the support system for farmers. The purpose of the trade deals is to open Britain to the markets of the world.

The danger is that, having legislated for top-quality British food standards, and set ourselves aggressive targets for carbon reduction, we simply offshore our environmental exploitation, our carbon emissions and our animal cruelty to other countries who are not so squeamish as us, and import their food once it’s neatly packaged.

As Daniel Zeichner MP, the Labour shadow farming minister, said in the Committee stages of the Bill, we could end up with a two-tier market in the UK: lovely sustainably-farmed British food for the rich, and cheap foreign muck for the masses.

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How to reconcile the Agriculture Bill and the trade deals — British beef and liberty? Mr Zeichner’s solution, backed by the NFU and a number of my Conservative colleagues, was to attempt an amendment to the Bill that would impose restrictions on our future trade deals: no food could be imported to the UK that is produced to lower standards than food made in Britain.

This sounds good, till you realise it would criminalise a lot of current imports from Europe and Africa, and impose an impossible expectation on our trading partners. As I cleverly tweeted last week, “are Labour proposing that we’ll only deal with countries that adopt our farming methods? Are we telling the Americans they should accept British rules, without having a say in making them? We tried something similar once and it ended up with a lot of British tea in Boston harbour.”

In the wrangle between the Agriculture Bill and the trade deals Conservatism needs to resolve what some call its essential contradiction, and others (including me) its fruitful tension. Which comes first, rural tradition or economic dynamism? Beef or liberty?

Libertarians remind us that trade and prosperity depend on comparative advantage. Different countries exploit their differences to specialise and compete, and the ‘loser’ in the race to make a particular product (say, food) wins too, getting cheaper food to buy and a wealthy foreign market to sell different products to (say, financial services and computer games). Global trade is an Olympics in which all get prizes: what you lose on the track you win in the velodrome.

And while we might have lost some of the agricultural races, we won’t lose all. As Owen Paterson has argued, we should be selling our beef to the US and our chicken feet (which we currently just bury, domestic demand being limited) to China, where demand is huge.

Surely British beef farmers should have the confidence in their product to pit it against all comers in the global market? To libertarians, the job of government in the food market is simply to enable frictionless free exchange across borders, so that the food people want — which usually means the cheapest food possible — is available on the shelves. Dan Hannan put this argument powerfully here. He would also say (I know, because he is a Wiltshire neighbour of mine and the proud possessor of a cloth cap and tweed jacket) that the rural way of life is best preserved by a small government.

And yet, and yet. Land is not a commodity like other commodities. It is finite, and they’re not making it anymore; and while the production of food may be best managed through the free market the other roles of the countryside — its somewhat central contribution to the health and wellbeing of the planet, and of people — are not. Nor is food really a commodity like other commodities, but a vital national resource we can’t trust entirely to vulnerable global supply chains.

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These factors force us to disapply the usual market logic, and acknowledge that government has a role to play in setting the terms of trade and the management of the rural economy. In free market theory the interests of producers are subordinate to those of consumers. In agriculture things are not so simple. The objective of food policy should not be ever-cheaper food: we already have the third-cheapest food in the world, after the US and Singapore (what is called ‘food poverty’ has nothing to do with food and everything to do with poverty, and should be addressed through family, welfare and employment policy).

The objective of food policy is more complex than product prices: it involves a complicated mix of security, environment and consumer interests, as well as respect for the almost spiritual identification of the nation with the land, its look and feel.

How, then, can we look after these interests? The Agriculture Bill paves the way for a new system of farm support, with payments for farmers for taking care of externalities like wildlife and water quality as well as food production: “public money for public goods”. The next imperative is to stop our farmers being too badly undercut by inferior cheap imports.

We can do this by insisting on high food safety standards, especially on pesticides; by good labelling so shoppers can clearly see what production values went into the food on offer; and by ad hoc bans on real horrors like chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef. We should put massive moral and regulatory pressure on the supermarkets to take responsibility for the food they offer us, and to be very scared of being discovered in a supply chain scandal.

But this might not be enough. And if not, we may need to reappraise the governing doctrine of conservative (really liberal) economic thought: frictionless trade. If necessary, tariff schedules in the trade deals should be used to drive up the prices of imports on food made with practices we don’t use here.

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

Before Dan Hannan chokes on his Peruvian ceviche, I emphasise that tariffs should not be used to eliminate real comparative advantages. We musn’t hike the price of Spanish oranges because they get more sunlight than we do; and it could be argued that if American farmers can get Mexican labour cheaper than British pickers, good for them. But we can use tariffs to discourage the most egregious behaviours: the pesticides and stocking densities that drive up yields at the expense of good husbandry and animal welfare.

Of course the obstacle here is not just the free marketeers among my Tory colleagues but the World Trade Organisation, which does not recognise animal welfare or environmental damage as reasons to restrict trade.

Here, then, is a noble mission for global Britain: to use our influence as the world’s third largest food import market to press for higher standards in global food production, both directly through our trade deals and indirectly through reform of the WTO. Let the world’s farmers compete on comparative advantages that are good and natural — soil and sunlight, tradition and expertise, the value of local techniques and supply chains — not on the advantages achieved by the abuse of nature.

Many rural Conservartive MPs, like me, voted for the Agriculture Bill last week on the understanding that our farming constituents would not be sacrificed in the coming trade deals. This is the great opportunity and challenge for British conservatism: to create a strong domestic base for our bold international ventures. Let us power our foreign conquests, as the Royal Navy did in the 18th century, on prodigious quantities of British cow. Beef before liberty.

I always imagined that the apocalypse would look a bit like the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But this valley seems oblivious to the crisis — it is all daffodils, snowdrops, birdsong, and trees bursting into leaf.

My flock is down in the valley bottom. The first lamb of the year was born today and is now lying with its mother. I come in from the fields and the TV news is like something from a science-fiction movie — they are building giant makeshift hospitals in the city centers. People are dying in their hundreds every day. But not far from the farmhouse a duck has made a nest by our pond and has laid thirteen pale green eggs in the midst of a perfect downy circle.

It is hard to connect the green fields where I work each day with the world of the virus. Hard to think it is the same world. But, of course it is. The virus has shown how connected we really are.

Suggested reading

How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Our elderly neighbours have locked themselves inside — we take them groceries and urge them to wash their hands and stay away from town. The schools have closed, so our children are helping us on the farm. And once a week, my wife travels to the local supermarket for supplies.

At first, she reported panic runs on face masks, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitiser, and toilet rolls; then it was staple foodstuffs, like rice, pasta, flour, and meat. Now, she describes the quiet (but very palpable) fear that has emerged about the robustness and resilience of our food supplies. The system doesn’t feel quite as permanent as it did.

It is because of that fear that people are hoarding. British people have a billion pounds’ worth more food in their homes than they did 10 days ago. Their panic and the subsequent spike in demand took stores — and Government — by surprise and we all need to calm down.

But the unexpected demand isn’t the whole story. The whole story is the fragility of our just-in-time food system, which the crisis has exposed.

Suggested reading

Why I fear isolation more than the virus

By Mary Kenny

It’s a logistically brilliant system — it has allowed us to shop whenever we want for whatever we want, regardless of season or whether harvests have been good or bad — but it isn’t nearly as robust as it might need to be. Like our banks, which we learnt in the 2007-8 banking crisis were “too big to fail”, we now have food systems that are so hyper-efficient that they have little slack capacity for a crisis.

And the crises are coming thick and fast — the Australian bush fires destroyed 140,000 sheep and cattle — and many orchards, vineyards and crops; the African swine fever in China has killed millions of pigs and is spreading. The farming systems we have created are vulnerable; the more specialised and monocultural and crowded they are, the greater the vulnerability.

The obsession with efficiency in our food economy has done its best to destroy a distributed local and diverse food economy — local abattoirs are now as rare as hen’s teeth, farmers markets have very limited capacity, and most areas are so specialised in their farming focus that they rarely produce the things that would give us a balanced diet.

Barely any of us know the fields that feed us or grow a significant share of what we eat. There is way too little local fruit and vegetable production in most areas, and there has been a general loss of the food culture that once existed to turn local products in to great meals.

The Herdwick lamb and mutton we produce was used to make countless different meals in the past, using the whole carcass. Today, we eat only the most expensive plastic-wrapped bits of a chicken, sheep, pig or cow; the lower value cuts are generally exported or processed. Such pickiness suddenly becomes a problem in a crisis, because if exports close down, or kebab places are in lockdown, the system backs up with products with no market. Last week, for example, sheep prices collapsed, because the system was suddenly frozen with confusion and log jams.

And after months of media noise about everyone going vegan, we can now see the reality laid bare in the supermarkets: people want the foodstuffs they have always eaten. The meat, milks, dairy and cheese shelves are noticeably empty, and the plant-based fake food shelves are remarkably well stocked and uncrowded — as my neighbour stated in the store, “No one really wants to eat that shit”.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

The argument has always been that we simply don’t need the old, mixed farming systems anymore — in which farms produce crops and raise livestock. But is that true?

Normally, we don’t all shop, eat or cook from these local sources, but a food system isn’t safe if it only works in the good times. Like sound healthcare systems, sound food systems need to have slack capacity for freak events. Britain produces about 60% of the food it eats; the other 40% is imported. It probably isn’t sensible to aim for 100% self-reliance (growing bananas in greenhouses in cold wet places in Britain is daft), but we need to be really careful about dropping too far from current capacity. It will make us vulnerable in times of crisis.

Norway has a deeply protectionist food system that supports its farmers as a matter of national strategic importance. Farmers there, for example, produce 80-90% of the national demand for beef and sheep meat. Since large areas of Norway aren’t globally competitive for agriculture, it doesn’t want to ‘outsource’ what food production it is capable of and put its rural communities — where family-run farms drive the local economy — at risk. It may turn out to be a very sensible policy. Ask yourself whether you trust Donald Trump to keep food supply lines to Britain open in a time of genuine food crisis? Or whether he might look after America’s interests first?

Many of us were politely pointing all this out as we headed into discussions about a free trade deal with America, which might reduce the share of Britain’s diet that is produced domestically, if the gates are opened for cheap food to flood in from North America.

No one was listening.

Suggested reading

The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

Less than a month ago, a UK government advisor, Professor Tim Leunig, was quoted in leaked emails as saying we didn’t need farmers, because the value of their output was a tiny share of the UK economy and we could import all the food we needed, perhaps at lower prices.

And for the past decade, a virulent strain of anti-farming environmentalism, led by noisy hard-Left radicals such as George Monbiot, has argued for us to turn away from farming towards producing food in synthetic industrial ways (with the promised pay-off of freeing more land for wild nature). This ‘land-sparing’ obsession embraces the worst industrial farming and corporate food systems.

Coming, as it does, from both ends of the political spectrum, this end-of-farming narrative is deeply worrying. My farming neighbours were rolling their eyes in disbelief a month ago at the absurdity of it all.

The obvious truth is that it takes a lot of food to feed 65 million souls — a fact that is so easily forgotten in the good times. With a full belly, everyone knows better than farmers how to manage land, and how to care for the countryside.

The lunatic anti-farming voices are rather quiet at the moment, though. The national discussion is, instead, about empty shelves, whether our food supplies are secure, and discussing whether farmers and others in the food sector are classified as ‘key workers’. Suddenly, more measured experts are being given airtime, farmers are being listened to — and our value understood.

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

Today, an estimated 8.4 million people are at risk of running short of food — and food banks won’t cope with that sort of demand. The closure of restaurants, pubs, cafes and bars hasn’t helped: we get something like 25% of our calories from these places nowadays. And the supermarkets are going to experience demand unlike anything they have ever known — with challenges that they aren’t used to coping with. Our fruit and vegetable farms often rely upon migrant seasonal workers who can now no longer travel to the work.

Professor Tim Lang, one food system expert, is now openly calling for the UK government to impose food rationing before we descend into a greater crisis. It’s no wonder people are panicking and behaving in ways we haven’t seen in generations.

There is public fear that our food system might not be up to it, but I think we probably can avoid a genuine food crisis in the developed world. Governments have responded relatively quickly to this virus, and it will be overcome. You shouldn’t read this piece and panic.

Instead, you should stay calm and shop sensibly. And you should eat what you buy: remember, we waste 40% of our food.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

We do however need to think very carefully about how the nation feeds itself, because in the long run we will need a truly robust and resilient food system, with strong local food economies. This is our wake-up call to respect farming once more — not uncritically: we have an absolute right to want more nature on farmland, high welfare standards for farm animals, and safe and healthy food. But Britain must seek to understand and remember the value of farming and food production.

Things are going to get a whole lot worse if, after this is all over, we continue as though nothing has changed and throw British farmers to the mercy of global free trade and systems that are big, bad and ugly. We need to protect this key national resource so it is there for us through thick and thin.

Because if another disaster strikes — and it will — then I want a significant share of my diet to be available within walking distance of where I live. I want to know where I can source food for my family, and if that means I pay a bit more for food in the good times, then so be it. As one Twitter wag recently posted, the City of London may offer a better way to get rich than farming, but “You can’t eat credit default swaps, kids”.

This particular tweet came alongside Trump’s shock decision to impose 25% tariffs on steel imports – a move targeting China. The People’s Republic is the world’s largest steel producer, responsible for over half of annual global output. The International Monetary Fund, traditionally reluctant to criticise US policy-making, said a Trump-inspired trade war could trash the global economic recovery. “Trade wars not only hurt global growth, they are unwinnable,” said IMF Director General Christine Lagarde.

Trump has long used stump-speech rhetoric to tell voters that low trade barriers in wealthy nations like the US, and unfair protectionism elsewhere, have caused the collapse of rust belt jobs – not least in industries like steel production. It’s an over-simplification, but one that Trump is hardly the first to use. In mid-2016, just months before the US election, Barack Obama imposed duties of over 500% on Chinese dumped “cold-rolled steel”.

Over recent months, though, Trump has dialed up Sino-US trade tensions to a whole new level. The US has proposed up to $150 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods – some of which could bite from next month. China retaliated, warning of tariffs on American exports if these US measures are imposed.

Trump then countered, demanding a “written plan” from Beijing to take $100 billion more in US exports. In recent days, these demands have escalated, with the White House now targeting a $200 billion cut to the $375 billion trade deficit by 2020.

The US wants China to open its market for financial services and reduce limits on foreign shareholding, while significantly tightening rules on intellectual property theft. President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser is now in Washington for the second round of trade negotiations this month. There are signs of movement from China, but very few. As the world looks on nervously, amid fears of an international trade war, the US Ambassador to China says the two sides remain “very far apart”.

Trump’s trade policy is often dismissed as ignorant economic nationalism. In her UnHerd documentary, my colleague Juliet Samuel questions that view. The President’s bombastic rhetoric could be a bargaining ploy, she suggests, with the White House using lurid threats to try to push China towards less protectionist outcomes. I’d say that’s right – and would go further.

Audiocast

Taking on China: how the West can save free trade

By Juliet Samuel

The US trade regime is far from perfect. America itself can be protectionist – and, of course, uses trade sanctions for broader geopolitical purposes. But after years of Chinese currency manipulation, patent law violation and state-sponsored corporate espionage, the usual forms of trade diplomacy have completely failed. Trump is right to come out swinging.

Now the world’s biggest manufacturer, China has proved adept at capturing overseas markets and buying up foreign companies – but with a marked lack of reciprocity. China has developed so fast, becoming so powerful so quickly, that the broader global economy – particularly previously hegemonic Western economies – have struggled to cope.

The truth is that, while Trump is hogging the headlines, Beijing holds most of the cards. The pertinent question now isn’t if Trump will do trade deals with China. It’s whether China will do trade deals with Trump.

As Beijing has turned the screw, Trump has made concessions. Last weekend, ahead of these latest Washington talks, Trump tweeted a pledge to help ZTE, a Chinese telecom giant, “get back into business, fast”. The US Commerce Department recently blocked American firms from selling parts and services to ZTE, which makes smartphones and other telecommunications equipment, after the firm apparently breached US sanctions relating to North Korea and Iran – causing ZTE, which employs 75,000, to halt operations.

Trump’s surprise volte face, for no apparent gain, has been spun as a “grand gesture”, part of the President’s “bait and switch” negotiation tactics. But it results from direct Chinese pressure. Over recent weeks, Beijing has ramped up inspections of US pork exports to China – with the implied threat that such “enhanced checks” could extend across US agricultural produce. Lucrative US scrap metal exports have also been effectively halted after the Chinese customs authorities suddenly stopped their cargo checks.

Reports have also emerged of Ford vehicles being held up at Chinese ports, with the US carmaker being asked for extra checks on emission components. In this tense trade stand-off, Trump may be doing the shouting, but it is the Chinese who are flexing their muscles – harming domestic US industries that Trump needs and winning concessions.

More on China from Liam

As China pitches for reserve currency status, the era of US hegemony is ending

By Liam Halligan

This reflects an underlying reality often unacknowledged. China has huge influence over America, not least due to its pivotal role in keeping the US financially afloat. Beijing officially owns around $1,200 billion dollars’ worth of US Treasury bills, making it by far the world’s largest creditor to Washington. On top of those holdings, swathes of US government debt is held via murky funds domiciled in Belgium – many of which lead back to Beijing.

The US national debt is now over $20,000 billion dollars, having more than doubled over the last decade. That’s 104% of GDP. As US debt grows, and with China soaking up vast amounts of new Treasuries each year, any signal Beijing might slow its purchases would send US markets into an immediate tailspin. That gives Beijing enormous power – leverage Trump will understand.

China is calling the shots on several fronts. Trump has lapped up plaudits for his role in brokering peace talks on the Korean Peninsula, for instance. Only a fool would fail to welcome the US President’s upcoming bilateral meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jung-Un. The meeting, though, is part of a broader Beijing-driven plan to ease the US out of the Pacific basin.

Dependent on China for food and fuel, Kim does what he is told – which is why this summit is happening. Trump will be allowed to claim some credit for denuclearising the Korean peninsula, as a pretext for downsizing the US naval presence in the region. China wants both outcomes, of course – and Trump, too, can live with this, as part of his “America First” strategy.

The same principle applies on trade. Trump is clumsy, his rhetoric often shocking. But he is, above all, a transactional President. Xi knows that China, now economically strong and financially flush, finally needs to open its doors to the world. And if Trump wants to claim credit for making that happen, in return for ongoing US access for Chinese goods, it’s a “win-win”.

I set out that hope as someone who nonetheless sees much good from his tenure[1.  I should probably explain more but, just for the moment, I’ll highlight the advantage of America’s Supreme Court remaining more or less evenly-divided rather than becoming a 6-3 liberal court – effectively run by judicial activists who are too ready to over-rule democratic and minority views.] and was proud, last week, to publish the atheist Justin Webb’s sympathetic explanation for Bible-believing America’s overwhelming support for Trump. It was a piece of journalism rooted in old-style reporting and immersion in US culture (from when Justin was the BBC’s North America Editor – and to a significant degree since). It was part of the insightful and not-yet-complete ‘Believers in Trump’ series put together by Katie Harrison.

Justin’s piece sought to dig down into why Trump’s core supporters voted as they did – rather than lazily and uncomprehendingly condemning and misrepresenting them. Nonetheless, while we should seek to understand and even sympathise, I’ve long believed that it’s the character question which made the unrepentant Trump such an inappropriate head of the American state. The US President is, after all, much more than a head of government (Obama was a superb HoS, not such a good HoG). The Clinton campaign commercial – below – encapsulated the argument I attempted in Standpoint magazine nearly two years ago.

It shouldn’t just be Trump who gets his just rewards. His apologists in the Republican party and broader conservative movement should, too. Last night in a special (by-)election in Pennsylvania we saw a sign of the big-league shellacking that could be heading his way and, in this November’s mid-terms, the way of the Never-er-um-oh-go-on-then-Trumpified-GOP.

It was only ten days ago that the Wall Street Journal declared the President’s steel tariffs were a winner – in that same state. Hmmm. The Journal has had to report this morning that the Congressional district which voted yesterday and which Mr Trump carried by 20% a year ago – and, given its economic make-up, should have been receptive to his protectionism for the steel industry – may well have been lost to the Democrats.

This must be perplexing for the journalistas who argued that last year’s Republican tax cut package (a bonanza for GOP donors – coincidentally, the newspaper’s readers and advertisers) would reap such dividends on Main Street. Choosing positions that maintain a circulation of two million turns out be easier than finding the components of an electoral pitch that can mobilise tens of millions of people.

But can Trump be defeated by a reformed Democratic Party? Or will the party’s strategists return to their demographic tables – showing rising cohorts of left-leaning, non-white, university-educated, unmarried, secular, and largely urban populations – and conclude there really is no need to reach out to the “deplorables”. Reasoning that the three million lead that Hillary Clinton enjoyed in the popular vote will be automatically five or six or seven million tall in 2020 and will overwhelm any uneven voting patterns in the electoral college. Yes, that might be a recipe for electoral victory (although Dems shouldn’t underestimate new tech’s impact on their own (more clean finger-nailed) voters’ welfare) but it’s not patriotic. It’s not auspicious for good, one nation government.

Whatever one may think of Mr Trump’s steel tariffs (and I love how our English-speaking friends pronounce “aluminium”), it’s the first time many feel someone is trying to do something. The Left’s loss of the working-class vote is no accident. Former industrial era workforces know the people running today’s parties of ‘labour’ are more comfortable discussing transgender rights and university tuition than the price of energy or the level of immigration.

So what does a non-world-and-progress-go-away but pro-worker agenda look like? Three alternatives stand out to me.

(1) Don’t subsidise the better-off

One approach was set out by UnHerd’s own Henry Olsen in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal this week (perhaps I’ve been too harsh on it?). In it, Henry, the Editor of our Flyover Country work (please see its spring-cleaned homepage), set out a range of measures on vocational training, a stronger safety-net and devolution of policy-making so solutions better fit with an area’s industrial heritage.

At the end of last year David Brooks listed other measures being proposed by reformist Republicans to address very real blue-collar anxieties. None of these ideas (which included faster forgiveness of bad credit and even of criminal histories) is an intellectual new-born, but they could be brought alive by canny political strategists.

In the UK, for example, a pledge by the Tories to oppose (most of) Labour’s tuition fees policy (and its subsidy of better-off university graduates[2.  Do read James Kirkup’s piece for UnHerd from last September for chapter and verse: “What is certain is that there’s a gap in the political market for someone to offer the poorest workers a better deal and better representation. Could the Conservative Party find a way to offer those workers something Labour and the trade unions don’t seem able or willing to give? That is, at the very least, something that Tories pondering the future should think about. Mr Corbyn appears to think he doesn’t need to do or say much for benefits claimants and the working poor, because his followers will take him on trust and his opponents will never dare to challenge him on that battlefield.”]) and instead pour the money saved into the kind of ideas identified by Brooks and Olsen would clearly communicate which party is on the side of those most hurt by disruptive technologies and emerging economies.

(2) It’s not Canada. It’s not Australia. Or other “allies”. The problem is China and it should face Trump’s wrath

The threat of those emerging economies and of one, in particular, is on Senator Marco Rubio’s mind. The Florida Republican refuses to defend Mr Trump’s blunt weapon that will hurt many other economies (once known by more internationalist, Pax Americana presidents as “allies”) when the villain is China.

Writing in the New York Times Senator Rubio spotlights Beijing’s currency manipulation, its use of industrial espionage in joint ventures with US companies and an unpunished tolerance by Beijing of intellectual property theft. The seasoned rulers of China are playing a long game and are willing to pay short-term prices (which many free trade absolutists refuse to tolerate or even recognise) if their dumping of excess production on world steel markets clears the way for strategic dominance and the long-term gains it would produce. Suggesting that 2.4 million US jobs have been lost to the communist state since China’s 1999 entry to the global trading system, Rubio calls for punitive duties on Chinese enterprises that behave uncompetitively or illegally.

(3) Why the rush?

And idea three is more philosophical than wonkish. Give up ‘free trade absolutism’ and most other kinds of absolutism. As much was recommended by Professor Niall Ferguson when he spoke to UnHerd last year. Yes, we can nearly all agree that – ultimately – free trade is better for all of us than protectionism. Almost always. In the long-term. That immigration – especially when controlled and targeted – can be of great economic, social and cultural benefit. Usually. We can also agree that technologies can’t be disinvented and most deserve to breathe. Innovation has brought huge gains – notably to women who, liberated from once back-breaking tasks by household appliances – are finally closing in on some degree of equality.

But let’s not rush. Let’s not be intellectually purist, assured that all will work well when the economic and social histories are written and that, in the meantime, we can afford to be careless, even mindless, about the transitional costs for those at the economic sharp ends. Governments are not as nimble as the innovators of Silicon Valley or the exporters of Mumbai. Giving extra time to evolve to arrangements that revolve clinically in economic textbooks may frustrate the Zuckerbergs or Davoskind but it’ll mean more support is in place – and trialled and tested by public servants – to ease the transition.

Tony Blair’s refusal to have transitional controls on immigration to Britain from the much poorer countries of central and eastern Europe was the best and ultimately self-defeating example of the absolutism of the brave new worlders. Let’s stop being labs for this kind of borderless utopianism.

Yesterday he was backing workers rights and today we learn that – like most of us – the Conservative MP for North East Somerset is not prepared to defend the telephone number salaries of so many CEOs of big businesses. JRM notes that the vast majority of business chiefs aren’t even risking their own capital and whenever things do go wrong in their companies – as Harriet Maltby has fumed – there’s often no or little downside for executive managers. It’s extraordinary, Rees-Mogg tells our interviewer Charlotte Pickles, that shareholders don’t already have the powers they should automatically possess to ensure sense is restored to boardroom pay.

JRM backed Trump’s controversial tax cuts package which many (including UnHerd’s Liam Halligan) have warned will largely benefit the rich and worsen the USA’s already large federal deficit. Mr Rees-Mogg’s response to those criticisms? ‘You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer’ and that tax cuts can pay for themselves because – as the economist Arthur Laffer famously argued – they unleash greater risk-taking and make work more attractive. It is true that most reductions in the tax burden do increase positive economic incentives. The evidence, however, is that most tax cuts fall well short of financing themselves.

If Jacob backed the Trump White House’s tax policy he warned that the President’s protectionist instincts risked creating higher prices for American consumers and a general down-turn in world trade  which could jeopardise the last 25 years of historic progress in reducing global poverty. He said we needed to do more for the casualties of globalisation and of economic change but closing our markets to the world wouldn’t help anyone. The White House is expected to make a decision on trade relations with China very soon and because the US President’s core voters believe the companies they work for don’t enjoy a fair fight with many overseas companies, there may well be political trouble for him in not acting. Henry Olsen blogged the polling numbers yesterday.

Tomorrow in the final clip of our interview, the subject will be policy towards the tech giants and how governments should ensure that the likes of Facebook and Google are our servants and not our masters.

Having been granted an audience with Roberto Azevedo, I travelled to the WTO’s Geneva Headquarters. Formal interviews with the Director-General are rare – and Azevedo has barely commented on Brexit since the UK’s referendum on EU membership back in June 2016.

Our discussion ranged far and wide…

Does Azevedo think the world is becoming more protectionist – with countries responding to economic difficulties by erecting more trade barriers?

“There is a danger, yes, but we are not there yet.”

Given how fast the weight of global economic activity is shifting eastward, should large multi-lateral organisations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO, set up by leading Western nations after World War Two, change to reflect new realities?

“It is already happening.”

Replied Azevedo, pointing out that both China and Russia have joined the WTO over the last twenty years. “We are progressively universalising,’ he continued, reminding me that the WTO now has 164 member states, between them accounting for over 95% of international trade. And, of course, Azevedo himself, as a Brazilian in the top job, is a symbol of the on-going transformation of the international regulatory bodies that oversee the global economy.

For my money, the WTO is the most important multi-lateral of them all. Negotiators from all member states congregate in Geneva, permanently arbitrating on trade disputes, under a system of agreed international rules. As such, the WTO is, effectively, the world’s supreme court on trade. Rules are strictly enforced, with nations agreeing to block exports from any member unfairly discriminating against any other. Tariffs are allowed under WTO, but they are generally low, and falling.

This multi-lateral framework has, for decades, checked politicians’ myopic tendencies to use trade barriers against specific competitors for short-term gain – a practice that, history shows, is often reciprocated, sparking mutual escalation, recrimination and deeply damaging trade wars. The WTO, then, acts as an insurance mechanism against global protectionism and commercial conflict.

As such, over the last 70 years, multilateral rules have enabled an enormous expansion of world trade, creating an age of unprecedented commercial cooperation across international borders – and, in relative historic terms, widespread peace. “The WTO’s multilateral system is fundamental,” says Azevedo. “It’s the main core that holds the global trading system together”.

Our conversation moves, inevitably, to Brexit. If Britain fails to strike a no-tariff free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU ahead of March 2019, when scheduled to leave, then UK-EU trade will revert to WTO rules. This scenario has been bitterly criticised by many Parliamentarians determined to frustrate Brexit. Labour MP Chuka Umunna has said “trading with the EU under WTO rules would be disastrous for British firms and jobs”. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable warns that the disruption could be “as serious as the [2008] credit crunch”.

The Director-General of the WTO disagrees:

“About half of the UK’s trade is already on WTO terms – with the US, China and several large emerging nations where the EU doesn’t have trade agreements. So it’s not the end of the world if the UK trades under WTO rules with the EU”.

Azevedo acknowledged that an FTA with the EU would be the best outcome for Britain, given that trading under WTO rules would result in some UK-EU tariffs but he remains sanguine:

“If you don’t have a fully-functioning FTA with the EU, there could be rigidities and costs – but it’s not like trade between the UK and EU is going to stop. There will be an impact, but I suppose it is perfectly manageable”.

I wrote up my exchange with Azevedo in detail in last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph. Here, on UnHerd, I’d like to provide more context, emphasising longer-term implications.

Not so disastrous…

To characterise trading under WTO rules as “disastrous” is alarmist and wrong. Having said that, a “bold and ambitious” FTA, keeping UK-EU trade largely tariff free, is obviously the UK’s preference. Theresa May made this clear in her Lancaster House speech of January 2017. But if we don’t secure an FTA with the EU by March 2019, we then charge reciprocal WTO tariffs, averaging some 2 to 3%. This is no way stops UK trade with the EU, as Azevedo has said, gainsaying the doom-mongers. All nations have ‘access’ to the single market, provided regulatory standards are met and that generally low tariffs are paid. The US and China conduct hundreds of billions of dollars of EU trade annually with no FTA. Britain can do the same. We’re well placed to trade with the EU on WTO terms as we’d start with full regulatory compliance.

If trading under ‘WTO rules’ is so bad, how does the UK already sell the majority of its exports beyond the EU – largely under WTO rules? Such non-EU trade generates a surplus and is fast-growing, as oppose to our EU trade which is shrinking and in deep deficit – despite the single market. Britain’s existing trade with the US, our largest single trading partner, is on the basis of WTO rules – not least as the EU, given the often conflicting needs of numerous member states, has failed to agree a US trade deal despite 60 years of trying.

Commercial logic, in the shape of the EU’s £71bn trade surplus with Britain, suggests Brussels should want a UK-EU trade agreement but a desire to ‘punish’ Britain – or the refusal of some sub-regional EU parliamentary outpost to ratify any deal – could prevail. On a purely practical level, therefore, it’s vital that the UK prepares for WTO trade with the EU – making the necessary upgrades to cross-Channel customs clearance, of both physical infrastructure and staff.

This makes strategic sense too. Unless the EU sees Britain is willing not to sign any FTA Brussels puts on the table, we’ll only be offered a bad one. Signing a terrible FTA out of desperation to ‘get a deal’ would disadvantage UK exporters and consumers for years. When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, existing members changed our entry terms at the very last moment, forcing the UK to give up sovereignty over our fishing waters. Similarly today, the UK will only secure an advantageous FTA, and ensure that it isn’t altered to our detriment at the last moment, if we’re willing, ready and able to trade instead under WTO rules.

Once the drama of Brexit is over, beyond March 2019 and any subsequent transition, WTO rules can then be used as a ‘platform’ to cut an FTA with the EU under less time pressure, making a better long-term deal more likely. Some UK firms are worried that WTO rules will hurt ‘complex supply chains’ across the EU. Yet most components are zero-rated for tariffs, even if the goods attract a tariff on final sale. Our EU deficit also means WTO rules will raise several billion pounds in net tariff revenues each year – which can be used to help UK sectors like automotives and agriculture, where EU tariffs are likely be higher.

‘No deal’ – trading with the EU with no FTA – is an entirely coherent position. It is very different from just ‘walking away’ – which means failing to settle administrative issues with the EU such as mutual recognition agreements on each others’ exports. No one is advocating such an approach. It is unthinkable existing and uncontroversial EU protocols granted to countless other non-EU members would not also apply to Britain after Brexit. For Brussels to deny such rights, in a reckless bid to block UK-EU trade altogether, would itself breach WTO and EU treaties, while incensing EU businesses and voters by threatening billions of euros of profit and countless EU jobs.

And when it comes to lurid scare-stories about planes not flying, Europe’s ‘Open Skies’ agreement applies to numerous non-EU nations and those outside the single market. The UK boasts a huge aviation industry, with numerous EU-based airlines using our airports, giving us much leverage. Politicians will beat their chests, and spread fear, but the commercial imperatives to strike new flight deals are mutual and massive. If the details aren’t finalised by March 2019, memorandums of understanding will surely extend current practice until new agreements are reached.

Again, ‘no deal’, in this context, means trading with the EU under WTO rules – the basis on which we already conduct most of our trade with the rest of the world. This is a position we must be publicly willing and able to adopt, if we are ultimately to secure the best post-Brexit EU trading arrangements possible. The EU’s on-going and increasingly blatant intransigence – on everything from citizens’ rights, to the ‘divorce bill’ and the Irish border – highlights why Britain must prepare to operate without an EU FTA, as such a deal may be refused, whatever we do.

It’s good news, then, that Chancellor Philip Hammond, in last week’s budget, committed the funds[1.  See Liam Halligan’s contribution to UnHerd’s Budget 2017 blog, “Phil Hammond, Brexiteer“.] to do upgrades to the UK’s customs and security infrastructure, that are needed anyway, and which make us ready to trade with the EU under WTO rules.

‘We know what is going on here’

 A few months after the 2016 referendum, the then Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Sir Vince Cable tried to calm fellow delegates at his own party conference who were disappointed the UK had voted for Brexit:

“There are people in the party who don’t accept the outcome, who feel incredibly angry and feel it’s reversible, that somehow we can undo it. The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say ‘sorry guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again’ – I don’t think we can do that.”

Cable has now changed his mind, of course. When the Liberal Democrats campaigned on a ‘fight Brexit’ platform during the June 2017 general election, the party’s vote share slumped to an all-time low. Yet in July 2017, when Cable became party leader, he promptly adopted the same second-referendum policy, despite previously stating that it would be “seriously disrespectful” to the electorate.

This volte face by one of the UK’s most respected and thoughtful parliamentarians is indicative of the febrile mood at Westminster, given the uncertainties raised by a hung parliament. Not only in the Commons, but also the Lords, the anti-Brexit lobby is mobilising – with opposition parties sensing their moment could soon arrive.

Cable’s actions illustrate that, when it comes to base politics, carefully reasoned positions and instinctive principals go out of the window. If you can damage your political opponents to the benefit of your party, you adopt the policy position required to do so. The close parliamentary arithmetic since June’s General Election means rational debate has given way almost entirely to blatant opportunism. This is why Azevedo’s intervention is potentially so important.

In her Lancaster House speech, the Prime Minister pledged a parliamentary vote at the end of the Article 50 process. “I can confirm today that the government will put the final deal that is agreed between the UK and the EU to a vote in both Houses of Parliament,” she said. But a strong Remain-supporting lobby in the Lords, then made a concerted attempt to alter the vote offered by May, attempting in March 2017 to amend the legislation to trigger Article 50.

Under the government’s proposal, if Parliament votes against any UK-EU deal, Britain reverts to a default option of trading with the EU under WTO rules, from outside the EU. A group of ultra-Remain peers instead promoted a default option that was somewhat different. Under their amendment, should Parliament choose to reject any UK–EU deal, the UK would then stay in the EU, despite the referendum result of the June 2016 referendum. This amounts, of course, to a Parliamentary veto on Brexit – even though both Houses of Parliament voted strongly in favour of granting the EU referendum and have since both passed Article 50.

As such, a ‘default EU membership’ parliamentary vote would seriously undermine the UK’s negotiating position. If Parliament were able to veto Brexit, EU negotiators – mindful of Britain’s large annual financial contribution and wanting to discourage other nations from seeking to leave – would ensure any deal ultimately offered was so bad as to guarantee public outcry and parliamentary rejection.

A vote that reverts to WTO rules, in contrast, gives the EU an incentive to make the trade aspects of any UK–EU deal beneficial to both sides, mindful that imposing unfair conditions on the UK could result in WTO rules, including tariffs on EU exporters. Powerful European commercial interests would then be incentivised to push for a constructive UK–EU free-trade deal, making a success of our on-going commercial relationship post-Brexit. This is precisely the outcome that the EU, and the pro-EU UK establishment, doesn’t want to happen.

The highly contentious amendment on a vote defaulting to EU membership was tabled in March 2017 by the crossbench peer Lord Pannick – the barrister behind the high-profile Supreme Court case brought by fund manager Gina Miller, which originally forced Theresa May to seek parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50.

Pannick had “a hidden agenda”, according to former Conservative Cabinet minister Lord (Michael) Forsyth:

“I have to say to the noble Lord, we know what he’s up to, we know what is going on here. This House is absolutely full of people who still haven’t come to terms with the result of the referendum and this is a clever lawyers’ confection in order to reverse the referendum result.”

Forsyth is exactly right.

In the end, despite more than seventy hours of parliamentary debate, the 137-word bill triggering Article 50 was eventually passed without amendment. But that was all -re-election. The combination of a hung parliament and the ongoing determination of the Lords’ pro-Remain lobby suggests peers will try once again, over the coming months, to amend a future Brexit-related bill with a ‘binding vote’ amendment, including a ‘revert to EU membership’ clause.

That’s why Parliamentarians determined to stop Brexit – in both the Commons and the Lords – want to paint ‘WTO rules’ as a disaster. Language often linked to this option such as ‘cliff-edge’ and ‘crashing out’, while repeated verbatim by broadcasters, is entirely misleading. It is designed to scare and confuse, preparing the ground for a Parliamentary showdown forcing the government to offer not a vote on accepting any EU deal offered or otherwise reverting to ‘WTO rules’, but instead on whether or not we should leave the EU.

During that battle, the testimony of such an unimpeachable, authoritative source as Roberto Azevedo ­saying the UK could manage perfectly well under WTO rules could prove extremely important. That’s why, since I published my Telegraphinterview, I’ve been subject to endless abuse on social media – with numerous Brussels-Remain lobbyists calling me “a liar”, casting doubt on the veracity of my reporting, accusing me of tricking Azevedo and even – absurdly – suggesting the WTO Director General “is confused about global trade rules’.

‘No Deal’ deadline

Agreeing no FTA with the EU before March 2019, is an entirely acceptable outcome for the UK – and it would be a major strategic error to think otherwise. Much of the florid language connected to ‘WTO rules’ – the ‘gun to the head option’ is another favourite of ‘Stop Brexit’ campaigners – amounts only to scaremongering, as Azevedo has now confirmed.

His intervention was welcomed by Liam Fox, International Development Secretary:

‘Far from the doomsday predictions given by some, if the UK trades under WTO rules with the EU, as Roberto Azevedo has said, that will be perfectly workable. While we clearly want a free-trade agreement with our friends in the EU, using WTO rules is entirely manageable”.

Dr Fox said that after Brexit, the UK will benefit from operating independently within the WTO, the result of no longer having to conduct trade policy as a member of the EU:

“My department is a firm supporter of the WTO and, as Britain becomes an independent trading nation once again, we will be one of the world’s strongest advocates for further trade liberalisation and modernisation.”

It is, then, by no means ‘a disaster’, to leave the EU with no FTA in place. This is a perfectly acceptable – and, in my view, given the EU’s bullheaded approach so far, it is now probably the most likely outcome. That’s why the government should very soon set a “no deal” deadline for the middle of 2018, after which the focus of the UK’s attention will switch from trying to negotiate an FTA with the EU to all the other aspects of departure that must be agreed, not least the various protocols required to trade under WTO rules.

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by President Clinton in December 1993 – has been headline news in the US. The agreement is currently being renegotiated, as promised by Candidate Trump. In August, President Trump reiterated his view that NAFTA is the “worst trade deal ever made”, and with negotiations seemingly at an impasse, his threat to terminate the deal looks like a real possibility.

We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada.Both being very difficult,may have to terminate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017

There has been much debate on the pros and cons of NAFTA, but on balance the evidence suggests it’s been beneficial – the problem is, that’s not really the point. Focus on retooling NAFTA is dangerously distracting from the more powerful forces that threaten US jobs.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Trump’s stance is based on his view that NAFTA has destroyed American manufacturing jobs. For once, the President is factually correct… just. The deal is estimated to have resulted in a net loss of around 100,000 manufacturing jobs.[1. Joshua Meltzer and Danny Bahar, NAFTA under the Trump – the myths and the possibilities, Brookings, 23 February 2017]

That, however, is just part of the story. Research has shown that for each job lost as a result of NAFTA there have been “several hundred thousand dollars of gains to the economy” as a result of increased productivity and lower prices. The cheap consumer goods, which help reduce the cost of living for millions of Americans, are overlooked by Trump. As are the export benefits of NAFTA and the deeply integrated nature of manufacturing supply chains across the three nations. ‘Intermediate goods’, like plastic and steel, are imported tariff-free, which in turn makes American products more globally competitive. Advanced manufacturing and energy are particularly dependent on these goods.[2. Joseph Parilla, How US States rely on the NAFTA supply chain, Brookings, 30 March 2017]

All of which, of course, is little comfort to those Americans whose solid, well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and who haven’t benefited from the new, higher paid jobs that have been created.[3. Research on the impact of NAFTA shows that on average, export-related jobs pay 7-15% more than lost import-competing jobs; Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Cathleen Cimino and Tyler Moran, NAFTA at 20: Misleading Charges and Positive Achievements, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2014] To them it’s simple: NAFTA equals job-killer. That was the view of my Atlanta customs officer, and it’s widely shared – Americans show the lowest support for NAFTA of all three nations, just 51% see the deal as a good thing (compared to 74% of Canadians and 60% of Mexicans).[4. Bruce Stokes, ‘Views of NAFTA less positive – and more partisan – in U.S. than in Canada and Mexico’, Pew Research Centre, 9 May 2017]

There’s no blank page

The problem is that scrapping NAFTA isn’t going to return America to a golden age of manufacturing.

In fact, it’s likely to make things worse. Caroline Freund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics goes so far as to say: “If the US blows up NAFTA, it will blow up the US economy.”[5. Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘The US, Canada, and Mexico are renegotiating NAFTA — here’s what each country wants’, Vox, 5 September 2017] That feels an overstatement, but there’s no doubt that after more than two decades, unpicking the deal would have real consequences. There’s no blank page to work with.

The US Chamber of Commerce calculates 14 million jobs depend on trade with Canada and Mexico – five million specifically on the additional trade generated by NAFTA.[6. .The Facts on NAFTA. Assessing Two Decades of Gains in Trade, Growth, and Jobs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, no date] Some of those jobs will be unaffected if the deal collapses (trade won’t simply stop). But for sectors such as auto and agriculture, the likely imposition of high tariffs would be disastrous – for states dependent on those industries, scrapping NAFTA would mean job losses.

NAFTA is a scapegoat 

Put NAFTA’s impact on jobs in perspective, however, and you can’t help but wonder why so much time and energy is being expended on a side-show. It’s like treating a patient’s paper-cut while ignoring his gunshot wound. The US lost almost six million manufacturing jobs in the decade starting in the year 2000 – but NAFTA has resulted in a net 100,000 reduction. (If you want some historical perspective, economist Brad DeLong points out that manufacturing as a share of employment has been collapsing since the 1950s.[7. Bradford DeLong, ‘NAFTA and other trade deals have not gutted American manufacturing — period’, Vox, 24 January 2017])

Indeed, many of the impacts associated with NAFTA would have occurred without the deal – that’s the process of globalisation. The US has no NAFTA-equivalent deal with China, but trade between the two countries has ballooned, resulting in similar benefits and drawbacks.

The gunshot wound? That’s automation. The drive for more efficient means of production has been constant. Throughout history, as technology from steam to electricity has evolved, low-productivity jobs have been replaced by higher skill, higher pay roles. But today we’re facing automation on an unprecedented scale. Seven times the number of jobs have been lost to automation as to offshoring. Why isn’t the Trump administration focusing on that?

Where are the meaningful policies to equip displaced workers with the skills to compete in new sectors? What is being done to incentivise businesses to re-train staff whose jobs are under threat of automation? Could large businesses making people redundant be required to provide a retraining package alongside the usual compensation payments?

Public employment services should be using local labour market data to identify growing and declining sectors and tailor their services accordingly. In a world where technological change happens at pace, continuing education and skills training is essential – where are Trump’s tweets on that?

Scrapping NAFTA is a bad idea – it’s highly unlikely manufacturing jobs will return to America, yet highly likely that jobs in the auto and agricultural sectors will be lost. But twist or stick, the outcome will be a footnote in labour market history. Whatever the result of the negotiations, the march of automation is not going to stop. In Atlanta, when I suggested NAFTA wasn’t all bad the customs officer asked, “Don’t you care about the poor?” I do, which is why I want to treat the gunshot wound.

“Clinton is the one that approved NAFTA … NAFTA is the worst deal, one of the worst deals our country has ever made, from an economic standpoint … one of the worst deals, ever.”[1.  Meera Jagannathan, ‘Here are all the terrible things President Trump has said about NAFTA — before deciding to stick with it’, New York Daily News, 27 April 2017]

President Trump’s words are at odds with the collective wisdom that free trade is a powerful driver of progress. That by stimulating exports and investment, and enabling cheaper imports, free trade delivers a higher standard of living in nations that embrace it.

Yet, as his election victory showed, Trump had grasped a fundamental truth: that while free trade does indeed create winners, it also creates losers. Competition from lower-cost imported goods undercuts domestic production, and while new and usually higher skill, higher pay jobs are created,[1.  Research on the impact of NAFTA shows that on average, export-related jobs pay 7-15% more than lost import-competing jobs; Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Cathleen Cimino and Tyler Moran, NAFTA at 20: Misleading Charges and Positive Achievements, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2014] that is scant consolation for those whose livelihoods, even identities, are lost.

This is why the President has set his sights on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – reiterating at a rally for supporters in Arizona last week his belief that the pact can’t be saved. Nearly 25 years after it was signed into existence, NAFTA is a useful case study of both the benefits and the limits of free trade.

This free trade agreement between America, Canada and Mexico has always been controversial. Ever since 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot talked of the “giant sucking sound” of jobs disappearing over the border, critics have lamented NAFTA’s impact on America’s manufacturing sector. And while NAFTA is by no means the only factor contributing to job losses – think China and advancing technology – the huge trade deficit between America and Mexico speaks for itself (the US goods trade deficit with Mexico was $63.2 billion in 2016, far exceeding the services surplus of $7.6 billion).

Twenty-five years ago, the the third party US presidential candidate Ross Perot argued (with rhetoric echoed by Donald Trump today) that NAFTA would see American manufacturing jobs ‘sucked’ to the south of the border by Mexico. The above debate took place with a much more youthful-looking Al Gore.

Which is not to say that the American economy hasn’t benefited – a review by the Council on Foreign Relations found a “modest but positive impact on US GDP of less than 0.5%”[2.  James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, NAFTA’s Economic Impact, Council on Foreign Relations, updated 24 January 2017] – but that the benefits were not being evenly spread. One study found a small net loss of around 15,000 jobs a year, but argued that for each lost job there was “several hundred thousand dollars of gains to the economy” – largely from increased productivity and lower prices.[3.  Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Cathleen Cimino and Tyler Moran, NAFTA at 20: Misleading Charges and Positive Achievements, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2014] The problem – again – is that the workers displaced don’t necessarily move into the newly created jobs – and yes, lower priced consumer goods are helpful, but you still need a wage to buy them. And therein lies the point Candidate Trump grasped to such political effect (helping him win the swing states of the rust-belt): in celebrating the broader positives of creative disruption, we must not lose sight of the turmoil experienced by those being disrupted.

But while the NAFTA debate centres on America and its President’s hyperbole, the more interesting story is how the free trade pact has impacted Mexico.

Free trade is an engine of growth for developing countries… and so what happened to Mexico?

America (like Canada) is a highly developed economy, one that, whatever the rhetoric, was never going to compete with cheap Mexican labour. But for Mexico, NAFTA would surely act as a rocket-boost to their developing economy. Surely? Well, that depends on what you measure.

An International Monetary Fund paper assessing NAFTA’s impact after twenty years concluded that, while tricky to isolate the agreement’s specific affects, it “played an important role in boosting trade and financial flows in the region.”[4.  M. Ayhan Kose, Guy Meredith and Christopher Towe, ’How Has NAFTA Affected the Mexican Economy? Review and Evidence’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, April 2004 ]

Additionally, we know that…

• In the two decades after NAFTA was implemented, Mexico’s exports to America and Canada more than doubled in dollar terms;[6.  Ayhan Kose, Guy Meredith and Christopher Towe, ’How Has NAFTA Affected the Mexican Economy? Review and Evidence’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, April 2004]
• US foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico surged from $15 billion in 1993 to over $100 billion in 2016;[7.  James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, NAFTA’s Economic Impact, Council on Foreign Relations, updated 24 January 2017] and
• Studies suggest total factor productivity increased by between 5% and 10%.[8.  Ayhan Kose, Guy Meredith and Christopher Towe, ’How Has NAFTA Affected the Mexican Economy? Review and Evidence’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, April 2004]

These findings are in line with the assessment of Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican Foreign Minister, that: “Viewed exclusively as a trade deal NAFTA has been an undeniable success story for Mexico, ushering in a dramatic surge in exports.”[5.  Jorge Castañeda, ‘NAFTA’s mixed record’, The Council on Foreign Affairs, January/February 2014]

As hoped, Mexico’s economy became increasingly integrated with their two free trade partners to the north – bringing new, higher skilled, jobs with better wages; faster technological adoption; and, according to the World Bank, reduced macroeconomic volatility.[9.  M. Angeles Villarreal and Ian Fergusson, The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Congressional Research Service, 24 May 2017]

Mexico, it seems, was reaping the multifold benefits of the free trade dream.

And yet, as Castaneda actually goes on to say:

“But if the purpose of the agreement was to spur economic growth, create jobs, boost productivity, lift wages, and discourage emigration, then the results have been less clear-cut.”

Which essentially translates into: success depends on how you look at it. Wages did go up for those employed in the higher skilled manufacturing jobs – predominantly in the foreign-owned maquiladoras (factories) built along the Mexican-American border – and productivity did increase significantly within big businesses. But as McKinsey reported in 2014:[10.  Eduardo Bolio, Jaana Remes, Tomás Lajous, James Manyika, Morten Rossé and Eugenia Ramirez, A tale of two Mexicos: Growth and prosperity in a two-speed economy, McKinsey Global Institute, March 2014]

“There is a modern Mexico, a high-speed, sophisticated economy with cutting-edge auto and aerospace factories, multinationals that compete in global markets, and universities that graduate more engineers than Germany. And there is traditional Mexico, a land of sub-scale, low-speed, technologically backward, unproductive enterprises, many of which operate outside the formal economy.”

Almost six in ten Mexicans work in the informal economy[11.  OECD Economic Surveys Mexico, January 2015] – which is partly cultural, but is also the result of tax incentives that encourage enterprises to stay small and social insurance costs for formally-constituted businesses.  And according to McKinsey, traditional, small and unproductive firms account for a rising share of employment.[12.  Eduardo Bolio, Jaana Remes, Tomás Lajous, James Manyika, Morten Rossé and Eugenia Ramirez, A tale of two Mexicos: Growth and prosperity in a two-speed economy, McKinsey Global Institute, March 2014]

At the same time, millions of Mexican farmers were displaced as a result of NAFTA, with the country experiencing a net loss of around two million agricultural jobs by 2007.[13.  Mark Weisbrot, Stephan Lefebvre and Joseph Sammut, ‘Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014] Tariff-free trade is a good thing when there’s a level playing field, but US agricultural subsidies far exceeded those in Mexico (one 2003 article on NAFTA put American subsidies at between 7.5 and 12 times larger than in Mexico)[14.  Jeff Faux, ’How NAFTA failed Mexico’, The American Propsect, 16 June 2003], making Mexican produce uncompetitive.

Which all helps explain why Mexico’s per capita GDP growth has been so dire at an average annual rate of 0.9% between 1994 and 2013. Mexico’s Latin American neighbours, including Brazil (1.8%), Chile (3.4%) and Argentina (2.5%)[14.  Mark Weisbrot, Stephan Lefebvre and Joseph Sammut, ‘Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014] all performed better – and without NAFTA.

Perhaps most damning, however, is the lack of impact on poverty rates – something free trade is, rightly, heralded for helping alleviate (again, think China, where extreme poverty has plummeted and global trade soared). Using its own national measure, over 50% of Mexicans live in poverty – as was the case in 1994.[15.  ‘Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty lines (% of population)’, World Bank Data, accessed 24 August 2017] Using the standardised method for tracking relative poverty, more than a quarter of Mexicans have been living below the poverty line between 1984 and 2010.[16.  Based on the proportion of people living on less than 60% of median income after taxes and transfers; Income distribution data review – Mexico, OECD, 2012]

Many commentators have questioned whether Mexico would have been any worse off had NAFTA not been enacted. And it is difficult to disagree with the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s conclusion that:[17.  Mark Weisbrot, Stephan Lefebvre and Joseph Sammut, ‘Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014]

“The end result has been decades of economic failure by almost any economic or social indicator. This is true whether we compare Mexico to its developmentalist past, or even if the comparison is to the rest of Latin America since NAFTA.”

The results of free trade are only as good as a country’s domestic policy

But perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. As the NAFTA negotiators head to Mexico for the next round of talks, rather than blaming free trade, perhaps America and Mexico should consider the domestic blockers to progress. Free trade is not, after all, a substitute for an effective state. As Victoria Bateman argued earlier in the week for UnHerd: a democratic, capable state – coupled with markets – is fundamental for prosperity.

Much more important in spreading prosperity and fighting poverty are a nation’s domestic policies. To take just a couple of examples.

• Both countries have an education and skills problem: just 21% of 25-34 year olds in Mexico have tertiary education, compared to the OECD average of 42%;[18.  ‘Population with tertiary education, 25-34 year-olds, % in same age group, 2015’, OECD Data, accessed 29 August 2017] and America is falling further behind advanced nations in science and maths attainment.[19.  Drew Desilver, ‘U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries’, Pew Research Center, 15 February 2017].
• And likewise, in both nations, access to credit is an issue. Low levels of domestic credit to the private sector in Mexico – unsurprising given the woeful protections afforded to creditors – is, according to economics professor Gordon Hanson, a drag on productivity.[20.  Gordon Hanson, ‘Why Isn’t Mexico Rich?’, Journal of Economic Literature, 2010] In America, a 2014 Harvard Business Review paper argued credit was vital to small businesses, but the data on access was “troubling”.[21.  Karen Gordon Mills and Brayden McCarthy, ‘The State of Small Business Lending: Credit Access during the Recovery and How Technology May Change the Game’, Working Paper, Harvard Business School, 22 July 2014] In May this year the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau launched a request for information on small business lending. Both issues are key building blocks of prosperous economies.

Conclusion

Attacks on globalisation – and therefore, by definition, on free trade – are rooted in real concerns. For too long the political-corporate establishment has brushed under the carpet the very real damage being done to communities and individuals whose way of life is being steadily eroded.

The experience of NAFTA shows that free trade, alone, is not sufficient to raise all boats. But it also shows that free trade can generate wealth. The question for politicians and policymakers is what to do with that wealth. Protectionist policies will invariably lead to less prosperity. An effective state should divert some of the spoils of free trade into providing new skills and other forms of transitional assistance to those on the losing side of globalisation. That’s the real lesson from NAFTA… but it may be too much nuance for President Trump.

OPINION POLLING ON NAFTA…

A Pew Research poll from May of this year found that NAFTA was most popular in Canada with 74% thinking it had been good for the country and only 17% thinking it had been bad. By nearly two-to-one (60% to 33%) the 25 year-old Agreement was also reasonably popular in Mexico. In the US, however, NAFTA enjoyed the much narrower approval margin of 51% to 39%. Full polling here.

…AND FURTHER READING

James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, NAFTA’s Economic Impact, Council on Foreign Relations, updated 24 January 2017

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Cathleen Cimino and Tyler Moran, NAFTA at 20: Misleading Charges and Positive Achievements, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2014

Mark Weisbrot, Stephan Lefebvre and Joseph Sammut, ‘Did NAFTA help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years’, Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014

Gordon Hanson, ‘Why Isn’t Mexico Rich?’, Journal of Economic Literature, 2010

M. Ayhan Kose, Guy Meredith and Christopher Towe, ’How Has NAFTA Affected the Mexican Economy? Review and Evidence’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, April 2004

Jorge Castañeda, ‘NAFTA’s mixed record’, The Council on Foreign Affairs, January/February 2014

Listen to Nigel Cameron talking about his new book, ‘Will robots take your job?’.

‘Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.’

So wrote Edmund Burke in 1795, capturing a timeless reality of commercial and political life.

Wealth is created and people are lifted out of poverty, the Irish political theorist and statesman argued, when trade is as open as possible, markets operate well and property rights are protected. As such, any country’s trade policy should aim to lower barriers faced by exporters while ensuring consumers can buy goods and services from abroad as cheaply as possible.

I have been re-reading authors like Burke, Adam Smith and Richard Cobden in recent months, in the context of Brexit. As the UK prepares to leave the European Union, the writings of these late 18th and 19th century radical thinkers, who supported open markets in defiance of the prevailing consensus of their age, are instructive.

Being outside the EU’s single market and highly-protectionist customs union will allow Britain to establish itself as a champion of global free trade, working to lower tariff and non-tariff barriers, so maximising cross-border commerce. There aren’t many universal lessons of history. One is that when countries trade extensively and freely, they rarely go to war. Trade fosters prosperity and peace.

This week’s column lays out two important principles relating to Brexit:

• The first is that, when it comes to the Article 50[1. “Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon gives any EU member the right to quit unilaterally, and outlines the procedure for doing so. It gives the leaving country two years to negotiate an exit deal and once it’s set in motion it can’t be stopped except by unanimous consent of all member states” – from The Daily Telegraph] negotiations, no deal really is better than a bad deal.
• The second principle is that, while free trade with the EU should be the UK’s ultimate aim after Brexit, we are more likely to get there in increments than in one step.

The best outcome from these Article 50 talks is that the UK and EU secure a free-trade agreement (FTA) before March 2019, when Britain is due to leave. Yet there is no pressing need to do so – and to think otherwise would be a major strategic error. If the UK ends up with no FTA with the EU, it can easily trade under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules – paying relatively low tariffs on exports to the EU.

Trading under WTO rules is presented as ‘disastrous’ by the anti-Brexit crowd. This is nonsense. The UK trades under WTO rules with the US, China and almost every other large non-EU economy. While an FTA with the EU might be preferable, trading under WTO rules is fine.

There are two reasons the UK should get ready to trade under WTO rules with the EU – making necessary preparations which include taking back a WTO seat and setting own tariff schedules. If Britain isn’t prepared, the EU will be able to impose an unattractive FTA that would disadvantage UK exporters and consumers for years to come. That is why WTO rules are necessary as a credible alternative.

The second reason is that, with the best will in the world, agreeing a complex, multi-sector deal with twenty-seven governments, who each want to protect their own conflicting interests, may not be achievable over the next 18 months. Settling on such an agreement – which must then be ratified by national parliaments and the European Parliament, could be impossible during the timeframe.

There are enormous mutual incentives for the UK and EU eventually to strike an FTA. While UK exports to Germany are estimated to support some 752,000 British jobs, around 1.3 million German jobs depend upon exports to the UK. This pattern is repeated across other EU countries. So, the UK is in a strong position to negotiate an FTA with the EU, but should not become fixated on doing so before March 2019.

Trading with no FTA does not amount to ‘crashing out of the EU’ – as opponents of Brexit so often claim. While an FTA would be better, it is worth waiting until after March 2019 if that means securing a better long-term deal for Britain.

If Britain does trade under ‘no deal’, relatively low WTO tariffs will apply to UK exports to the EU. These average 2.3% – although they are higher in some sectors, such as cars and agriculture. In nearly all cases, though, EU tariffs are less than the extent to which sterling has depreciated since the EU referendum. The UK’s trade deficit with the EU also means mutually-imposed WTO tariffs will raise revenue, which the government can use to compensate exporters, as part of any transition arrangement. No deal is better than a bad deal, then – a principle the government should state clearly and often.

The second principle is that free trade should be a medium-term goal, not a one-off outcome. Some liberal economists argue that if Britain does end up trading under WTO rules with the EU after March 2019, the UK should grant the EU tariff-free access, even if Brussels imposes WTO tariffs. Although sympathetic to this view, on balance I disagree. Such a policy of unilateral free trade (UFT) is attractive in theory, and would definitely lead to lower prices for UK consumers and intermediate goods via cheaper imports – as captured in Burke’s quotation.

Free trade should a destination that Britain moves towards, though, rather than a policy shift linked to Brexit. Once outside the EU, trading under WTO rules, the UK will be well placed to negotiate a UK-EU FTA – which will, by definition, reduce import tariffs. But having WTO tariffs we can offer to remove will strengthen our hand in future negotiations, encouraging the EU to lower tariffs in response.

While I fully accept the medium-term gains from unilateral free trade, it will be important, as we approach the end of the Article 50 negotiation and after, to consider the economic dislocation to UK sectors currently behind the EU’s tariff wall – including agriculture and some parts of manufacturing. While it makes no sense permanently to subsidise producers at the expense of consumers, we should be mindful of the regional impact of exposing some domestic sectors to immediate global competition. As such, UK tariffs post-Brexit should be reduced boldly but steadily, alongside temporary ‘transition’ payments to certain sectors.

Even with such measures, there is much scope once outside the EU for the UK to return to the forefront of worldwide efforts to secure free trade among major economies. And keeping some tariffs will help negotiate away trade barriers maintained by other countries. This approach combines the benefits of free trade with a pragmatic grasp of domestic and international politics.

The nub of Burke’s insight – that the consumer gains of an open trade policy are considerable, and disproportionately benefit the poorest – came to the fore almost half a century after he was writing, when the UK repealed the Corn Laws. Backed by landowners and the establishment, these protectionist import tariffs on food were defeated by Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and the Anti-Corn Law league. They led a moral crusade that lowered food prices and shifted the balance of economic power away from the elite to the people – by letting the market work.

Brexit can act in a similar way – taking the UK out of the EU’s protectionist customs union, so allowing Britain to lower import tariffs on non-EU goods. Yet the UK must use its new freedoms wisely, cushioning the most vulnerable and helping fragile sectors adjust – lest support for the broader whole is lost.

Ida Tarbell, the journalist and campaigner after whom this column is named, also backed free trade. During the 1890s and 1900s, she railed against import tariffs imposed by the US government, in cahoots with powerful domestic producers – which often outraged the American public. “The last man to be heard at tariff hearings is the man who buys to goods,” she wrote in 1906, “at a time when wealth is rolling up as never before, a vast number of hard-working people are really having a more difficult time making ends meet”.

Outside the EU, tariffs on non-EU goods will be much lower – which is set to make all kinds of imports cheaper, not least food. Import tariffs, which benefit producers at the expense of consumers, should be steadily phased out. Brexit allows this to happen, with Britain positioning itself, once again, as the global champion of free trade.

> Watch Liam Halligan’s new film about the life of Ida Tarbell

Steve Bannon, the controversial former White House strategist, is gone, but not forgotten. At least he shouldn’t be forgotten, not least of which by a Republican Party still struggling to figure out how to proceed in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Bannon has many faults, but his vision for a flyover-country–friendly GOP was spot on.

Bannon saw early on what few other Americans did: that millions of Americans without a college degree were bearing the brunt of the country’s sweeping economic and cultural changes. Their jobs were disappearing or paying less; their values were under constant assault or ridicule from educated Americans right and left; their children were fighting America’s wars and policing America’s streets, with the former seemingly never ending and the latter increasingly caught up in the nation’s racial controversies. Many of these people were habitual Democrats but they were ready to abandon a party they felt no longer cared about people like them – but only for a Republican Party they thought did.

On free trade, controlling immigration, opposing overseas wars, Bannon was not a typical Washington Republican

Bannon, who grew up in a Democrat family himself, saw what long-time Republicans would not: these people would never support a party that they thought cared more about money than people. So Bannon – as both editor of the website Breitbart and as chair of the Trump campaign – emphasised issues and causes that weren’t typically Republican, issues that appeared to place people ahead of profits. Attacking free trade was one, crusading against illegal immigration was another.

The result was Trump’s unexpected victory fueled by record high support for a Republican nominee among white voters without a college degree. Trump won these voters by a whopping 37 points, 66-29 according to the exit poll. Moreover, he won subsegments of these voters that almost never vote for Republicans. Many of America’s non-college whites are evangelical Christians, and they regularly vote Republican because of their social conservatism. Non-evangelical Christian, non-college whites have always been leery of a business-friendly GOP, but they flocked to Trump precisely because he wasn’t cut from the same cloth. These voters fueled his narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that gave him the White House under America’s unique Electoral College system.

One would think this would have opened Republican eyes. You would be wrong.

Bannon helped Trump win by motivating a different voting coalition – unfortunately the Republican leadership hasn’t noticed

Despite the fact that large numbers of these new Republicans get their health insurance through Obamacare, the GOP’s Congressional leadership tried to shepherd through bills to repeal and replace Obamacare that emphasised cutting taxes and spending over providing affordable health insurance for the working class. There is seemingly no appetite to deal either with the negative effect global trade has had on millions of Americans or with the illegal immigration that continues to tax American communities. They are preparing to introduce a tax reform plan that gives almost no relief to working class voters but slashes taxes for corporations and the rich. Republicans are acting like the classic post-Napoleonic Bourbons, forgetting nothing and remembering nothing.

Bannon was often wrong. He was peculiarly blind to the effect failure to vociferously condemn white nationalism would have on his putative political coalition. Denouncing neo-Nazis is about the easiest way to score political points there is: failing to do that is like Cristiano Ronaldo missing a sitter in front of goal. Those on the right who, with Bannon, point out the extreme left’s own proclivities to provocation and violence, should recall Jesus’ admonition to remove the beam from your own eye before you criticise the mote in your neighbour’s. No centre-right coalition anywhere in the world can be constructed without clearly rejecting the neo-fascist elements that still lurk in nationalist swamps.

Nor was Bannon correct in his sweeping rejection of America’s traditional global alliances. He is right that many Americans are tired of foreign wars that seem endless, but Americans still support an active global military presence even as they disagree on the extent to which such presence should extend. This is particularly true with military commitments to fight Islamic terrorism, as is the case in Afghanistan. Combatting Islamic terror is the single issue that unites populist blue-collar voters with traditional Republicans, and polls usually show support for overseas involvement rises when a foreign threat materialises.

The voters Trump brought to the Republicans don’t want libertarianism – they want help

Bannon’s errors, however, should not obscure his major insight, that blue-collar voters beset by economic and cultural change want active, not passive, government. Around the world, these voters want governments that understand and care about their views and problems. They do not want to be treated like collateral damage in the pursuit of a global society. They are not the serfs of urban elites, and they do not want to be led irretrievably down the road to serfdom.

Donald Trump, whether by instinct or reflection, understood this. His brusque manner, as well as his indulgence of the basest and coarsest instincts in American politics, alienated millions. But for his blue-collar fans, he is the only leader who really cares about people like them.

Bannon had one other insight center-right leaders around the world should take to heart. He once said that the populist movement wasn’t going away, the only question was whether it would join with the left or the right. That seems to be the case in virtually every country in the world: the only alternative is the formation of a new, centrist, left-right alliance of the well-to-do like Emmanuel Macron’s Republique En Marche. For a host of reasons, that will not happen in the United States any time soon.

Republicans sit on a knife’s edge. Stray but a little from the populist-conservative alliance and the American Left will have a chance to shape American politics for years to come. To avoid Senator Elizabeth Warren becoming the next president, Republicans need to listen to Steve Bannon.