Trade

China’s various human rights abuses, their treatment of women, their savagery toward religious people and their chokehold on Taiwan and Hong Kong, has long made them a target for economic boycotts by Westerners. But executing a successful one is exceedingly difficult to achieve. In 2003, disappointed that the George W. Bush administration reaffirmed their ‘One China’ policy in regards to Taiwan, I launched my own boycott of Chinese goods. It was difficult but felt worthwhile to spend extra time looking for the ‘made in’ label on goods I was buying. And then I needed a shower curtain. I visited store after store and could not find one made anywhere except in China. I lived without a curtain for months before giving in and buying a Chinese-made one.

‘This is a good day for America,’ said President Bill Clinton on May 24, the Year of Our Lord 2000. ‘In 10 years from now we will look back on this day and be glad we did this.’ Clinton was talking about the House of Representatives’ vote to award normal trade relations to China. And he was right. By 2010, despite the crash of 2008, the knowledge class still largely considered the decision to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization as a great boon. China’s rise had turbocharged globalization and made us all richer — never mind the stupefying sovereign debts. Labour unions had opposed it, but leaders and corporations were still enthralled by the gargantuan consumer markets.

It will no doubt be met with furious resistance in parliament and on the streets. There will be an outcry over chlorinated chickens. There will be scare stories about the National Health Service being sold off. And the farmers will be angry at the prospect of the country being flooded with food that is far cheaper than anything they can produce. Even so, assuming the Conservatives win the election, we leave the European Union and Donald Trump wins re-election to the White House (OK, I will agree the hypothetical is doing some heavy lifting in that clause), Britain and the United States are going to attempt a comprehensive free trade agreement. That will be a big deal. America and the UK are, respectively, the biggest and fifth biggest economies in the world.

Of all the 9/11 conspiracy stories, one of the most persistent is the suggestion that al-Qaeda funded its operations by short-selling the shares of airline companies in the days before the attack. Inevitably, airline shares plummeted that day, netting short-sellers vast profits. While there was an increase in short-selling before the attack, no-one has proved one way or the other whether that was history’s most audacious case of insider-dealing or just a reaction to an industry which was already in trouble for purely commercial reasons. But is someone now trying on the same trick with the US-China trade war?

The animosity between the Trump administration and Europe has not yet damaged military relations, but the same can't be said for economic ties. Negotiations for an EU-US free trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (‘economic NATO,’ as the organization’s former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had called it), have stalled, perhaps permanently. Negotiations are at ‘a stalemate,’ said EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström. The Council went a step further, declaring the mandate for the talks to be ‘obsolete and no longer relevant.’ TTIP’s demise, and the frustration it has caused the Americans, might augur well for another possible transatlantic trade deal.

‘If we will not endure a king as a political power,’ Sen. John Sherman of Ohio said in 1890, ‘we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessities of life.’ These words helped drive through the Sherman Anti-Trust Act that saved early American capitalism by breaking up Standard Oil and the robber barons’ fiefdoms.A long line of Anglo-Saxon dragon slayers straggles behind the senator, all the way back to King John at Runnymede. Over-mighty kings and industrial barons get short shrift in Britain and America. This isn’t mere resentment. It is a philosophy of power and knowledge, and the principle behind democracy and free markets.

David Davis, the former Brexit minister, and Owen Paterson, another pro-Brexit ex-minister, confirmed Friday morning that they’re meeting with Trump administration officials to discuss a US-UK free trade agreement. Theresa May, the stricken British prime minister, refuses to discuss a US-UK FTA until after Britain has withdrawn from the EU in March 2019, and after Britain and the EU have made a new trade deal. This week, May forced a draft of her withdrawal bill through her cabinet, but sparked resignations from her cabinet and open revolt from pro-Brexit Conservatives. ‘We’re clearly here to advocate for a US-UK free trade agreement,’ said Shanker Singham of the Institute for Economic Affairs, who serves as an outside adviser to Boris Johnson.