Mandy and Hu He leave M&S’s customers to catch a cold in the High Street

The long line of young women outside Marks & Spencer, arms folded modestly across their chests as they wait for their brassieres to arrive, is a standing rebuke to the European Single Market. Even Peter Mandelson, now installed as commissioner in charge of trade, is talking of a glitch. It is, in fact, the by-product of some clumsy diplomatic bluff and counter-bluff with Hu He, the Cantonese manufacturer and underclothier to the world. Hu’s European competitors have lobbied their governments, they have contrived to stitch things up in Brussels, and shiploads of containers from the Pearl River are now choking the port of Rotterdam while his customers shiver in Kensington High Street. How happily, all those years ago, we signed up for the single market in the belief that our goods and services could now flow freely across Europe. What we had done was to hand our trading policy over to Brussels. We threw away our advantage as an importer of food, able to buy on the best terms in the world’s markets, and have been paying for that unilateral concession ever since. We also joined a club whose rules, unusually enough, precluded us from joining any others. Nafta, the North American free trade area, is a lively club, and Senator Phil Gramm once offered to put us up for it. He could get our nomination through Congress in a week, he said. There was nothing in Nafta’s rules against it. The Foreign Office went out of its way to snub him. Didn’t he know that this was against the rules of the Treaty of Rome? He would get us expelled. Silly senator.

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