George Brandis is Australia's High Commissioner to the UK and has written an article (HERE) for The Telegraph, saying Britain was once a global trading power and can be so again after Brexit. The first part is right but I have serious doubts about the last bit. Britain was once the workshop of the world and it's true we were at the centre of a global trading network - it was known as the British empire.
He writes:
"In fact, it is hard to think of a nation in history whose prosperity was more directly the product of free trade. For centuries, Britain was a land of merchant adventurers, for whom the oceans were highways of a global commerce".
There are two problems with his assertion. The industrial revolution gave us an unrivalled advantage in supplying cheap manufactured goods to the rest of the world. Of course, it was the wealthy mill owners who benefited the most at the expense of those who laboured for a pittance for sixteen hours a day in appalling conditions. A visit to any industrial museum in the north of England will show this. I recommend the ones in Leeds and Bradford as an eye opening experience for Mr Brandis.
It is the empire which is the other problem. Without the empire there would not have been the industrial revolution and vice versa. Each depended on the other.
"What set the British colonial empire aside from its rivals was not the quality of its sugar colonies but the involvement of the temperate colonies on the North American mainland. Unlike the slave colonies created to exploit staple exports, English emigrants to the northern mainland sought to establish independent settlement. These colonies lacked staple products and residents financed imports by exploited opportunities the empire provided, providing for shipping and merchandising and compensating for the lack of European market for the timber or temperate agricultural products by exporting to the sugar colonies which, in turn, concentrated on the export staple.
"The British Empire was unique and its development provided an important and growing diversified and relatively wealthy market for British manufactured goods that all other empires lacked. Although the mainland colonies financed their imports of British manufactured goods by intergrading [sic?] into the slave-based British Atlantic, it seems likely that in the absence of opportunities in the slave colonies the mainland colonies would have imported similar amounts of British manufactured goods".
We had control of half the world with ready access to cheap raw materials like cotton and sugar (HERE) plus, effectively, a massive captive market for finished goods where we usually set the price. We couldn't go wrong - until the empire began to collapse, the supply of cheap raw materials was cut off and at the same time, competitors like the USA, Germany and latterly China caught up and overtook us in quality and price of manufactured goods.
Today one might question if British manufacturing was ever really competitive or was it the absence of competition and a near monopoly on raw materials that allowed us to thrive?
I doubt whether the two fundamental conditions that gave birth to Britain's reputation as a 'global trading power' can ever be recreated.
