When Daniel Hannan writes about Brexit and trade, he is invariably interesting. He has been the Tory MEP for South East England since 1999, making him a contemporary of Nigel Farage, with, presumably, the same expectation of an EU pension of £73,000 a year.
More to the point, he has been a thoughtful Eurosceptic for all of that time and a tireless advocate of Britain’s future as a blue water power.
What happens to Hannan post-Brexit, is one of the more intriguing political questions of our time. Will he become a highly-paid consultant for British exporters hoping to make it big in the brave new world we are assured is just over the horizon, or will he secure a Westminster seat, with a view to joining the next Tory government, most obviously as trade secretary or (irony of ironies) minister for Europe?
Hannan is a Europhile in the old, nineteenth century sense. He loves Spain and France. He may even have a soft spot for Germany. For him, the Grand Tour is an ongoing delight. But having started his political career in the belief that British membership of the European Union was a historic error, he has never deviated from that position. He wants us out bag and baggage so that we can take our rightful place in the global marketplace. As far as he is concerned, the EU is a stagnant corner of the world economy, old-fashioned and inward-looking, that for too long has held us back, reduced to the beggary of being the world’s fifth-largest economic power when we could (and should) be … what? Third? Fourth? Bigger than Japan? Bigger than India? It’s hard to know.
To kick-start the process, he says, we should join Australia and New Zealand (then Singapore and Hong Kong) in a harmonised free trade pact that includes services as well as goods. He also supports the idea – currently being explored by Liam Fox and his trade team – of British membership of the re-worked Trans-Pacific Partnership. He is not put off, apparently, by the fact that Donald Trump last year took his country out of the TPP in pursuit of his America First strategy. Rather, he sees the UK, in spite of its pesky physical location, as a natural member of the Pacific Rim, benefiting from that region’s undoubted dynamism while turning its back on sclerotic Europe as it sinks deeper and deeper into the mire.
In a way, none of this should come as a surprise. Hannan was born on the Pacific Rim, in Lima, Peru, and grew up there and in neighbouring Bolivia, where his family owned a cotton farm. He could have stayed in Latin America, but, having graduated from Marlborough and Oxford, he chose instead to make his life in the Mother Country, from which, at the tender age of 27, he was elected to the European Parliament – the job he has held ever since.
In an article published in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, he writes:
“In Latin America, the countries of the Pacific littoral are turning their backs on their neighbours and staring out across the ocean. Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, the chief advocates of free trade in the region, have formed the Pacific Alliance, consciously differentiating themselves from the populist states on their borders.”
This is a peculiar development, is it not? Instead of working together for the common good, taking advantage of their shared space and heritage, these Spanish-speaking nations choose to look to China, a one-party state, as the centre of their world. Hannan applauds this, noting that “in the US and Canada, people have for decades been relocating from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific,” giving cities like Vancouver “a distinctly Asian feel”. Britain, he says, needs to follow suit. It may, he admits, seem “strange and counter-intuitive,” but our trading future lies not next door in democratic Europe, but half a world away, in new economic order dominated by Communist China.
Now I do not doubt that Asia will over the course of the next 30 years be confirmed as the economic centre of the world. For a start, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population lives there. But that doesn’t mean we have to pretend that we are Asian, too. What is to prevent us developing our trade with China and India as things stand? What is standing in our way? Germany’s exports to China are five times greater by value than those from Britain to China. Belgium – one sixth our size – sells more to India than we do. Neither is about to abandon the European Union. If the UK is so keen to become a Pacific power, why can it not build out from its natural European base, as President Macron of France and his 100-strong trade team are doing this very day? Why could we not have spent the last two years demanding closer EU-Pacific links, to include Australia and New Zealand, rather than our own ill-thought-out departure from the existing Single Market and Customs Union?
It makes no sense. We may not be able to have our cake and eat it, but what reason was there that we could not enjoy the best of both worlds?
Hannan writes that the EU is a child of its time, devised In the 1950s when regulation was ubiquitous, freight costs were high, and trade was dictated by proximity. Now, he says, we can fly from London to Beijng in the blinking of an eye, rendering Europe, it would seem, culturally rich but economically irrelevant.
“We need to lift our eyes to more distant and more opulent horizons,” says the MEP for South East England. He urges us to turn our backs on Europe and present ourselves as (apparently) we really are – the natural turning hub of world trade, looking down on Asia not from our misplaced location 20 miles west of Calais but from some virtual commercial variant of the international space station.
Do you believe that is how China sees us? Do you think President Xi Jinping is waiting to slot us into a privileged corner of his Forbidden Kingdom? I don’t.
