Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation’s conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been ‘meeting farmers and communities at the sharp end’, he has concluded that free trade isn’t such a good idea after all. ‘The way forward,’ he writes in the Guardian, ‘is through a regime of managed trade in which markets are slowly opened up and trade policy levers like subsidies and tariffs are used to help achieve development goals.’
It isn’t just his days as secretary of state for trade on which Mr Byers is turning his back. As recently as last autumn he was emerging as an unlikely champion of free trade and enemy of protectionism.
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