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. Brexiteers, meanwhile, are sanguine about tariffs on EU trade, while talking as if tariff-free American trade would be transformative.
The only way to square these two contrary positions is through the highly partisan politics of Brexit. Free trade with the US is opposed by some Remainers for no better reason than because it is advocated by Leavers. The advantages of free trade with our closest neighbours are being dismissed by Brexiteers because Remainers want them. On such a foolish basis is the future of Britain’s trading relations with the rest of the world being debated.
The reality is that free trade is almost always on balance a good thing, regardless of which country it is conducted with.
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