Trading places | 8 August 2019

Comments by the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers this week, claiming that Britain will come off poorly in negotiations for a trade deal with the US, should not be surprising. He has previously declared that Britain’s vote for Brexit was ‘the worst self-inflicted policy wound that a country has done since the second world war’ so he would not want to be proved wrong by Britain doing well out of leaving the EU.

But the reaction to his intervention has emphasised a peculiarity in attitudes towards free trade, from both Brexiteers and Remainers. Many of those who are keenest to assert the importance of free trade with the EU tend to retreat in fright whenever the prospect of a trade deal with the US is raised. Exit the single market, they tell us, and Britain will face a shrinking economy, along with shortages of food and medicine. Negotiate a trade deal with the US, on the other hand, and we face the NHS being destroyed, as well as the population being forced to eat genetically modified food and chlorine-washed chicken.