The government is taking the have cake and eating it policy to new heights of absurdity. Or perhaps I should call it the have chicken and eating it policy. The Telegraph had an article yesterday claiming Britain is ready to allow chlorinated chicken to be imported but with a high tariff. It is as if we are finally getting close to the brutal reality of Brexit. Despite all the assurances that chlorinated chicken will not be allowed in at all, we find that it will but on a dual tariff regime.
The Telegraph say:
"The proposal for a trade deal with the US is for a “dual-tariff ” regime which sets duty on imported foods depending on compliance with animal welfare standards. Hormone fed beef, chlorinated chicken and other foods will be allowed but with tariffs to make it uneconomical for US producers to export them here. BRITAIN [sic] would allow imports of chlorinated chicken from the US, but with high tariffs on cheaply-produced food to minimise the impact on UK farmers."
Chicken and other meat reared to our standards will come in with a lower tariff apparently and while the NFU have welcomed it as a move in the right direction, Brexiteers are unhappy that food prices won't fall. On this last point an article in the FT yesterday showed Britons are second only to the Americans in the amount of weekly income spent on food. We already have almost the cheapest food in the world.
But reading the article further it says that Trump, an opponent of tariffs, and could "reject the idea out of hand".
I would say this is a stone cold certainty.
Apparently, ministers are "trying to achieve a balancing act of bringing down the cost of living for British consumers through post-brexit trade deals while, at the same time, protecting the interests of British farmers who are at risk of being put out of business if they are undercut by imports".
Of course it all depends on the amount of tariff imposed. The US will want zero or very small tariffs or tariffs which taper over time. If we impose a tariff that reflects the big cost advantage the US has then there is little or no point in them exporting to us anyway.
If the US retaliates by imposing tariffs on British lamb, what is a trade deal worth? And multiply this across every other sector, not just farming, and if you try to protect your home industry your negotiating partner will do the same to their domestic producers. At the end neither side gains an advantage.
Trade negotiations are like a chess game. You have to sacrifice something in order to gain a net advantage. Farmers who voted for Brexit may soon realise that any trade deal with the US is bound to be driven largely by the powerful agri-food lobby in Washington and British agriculture will be the sacrificial lamb.
Fishermen will find that they too will be sacrificed to save the £30 billion a year of financial product exports to the EU.
Ever since early in 2016 when the whole Brexit thing kicked off, the ministers now in government have tried to pretend there are no painful trade-offs in leaving the EU. Warnings were dismissed as scaremongering. Promises of a new wealthy and more global Britain with everyone much better off were made alongside soothing assurances for producers that they had nothing to worry about. Gove has given any number of them, that low quality food would never be allowed in at all.
Now we begin to see the hollowness of it all. The contradictory promises will never be realised.
These are the kind of moral dilemmas that EU negotiators have spent years trying to balance out and the reason trade negotiations take years to conclude. As in so many other areas Brexiteers are the loud-mouthed blokes shouting from the side about how much better they could do - now they are facing the same issues. Somebody must lose and they will be the ones selecting and explaining to the losers why their jobs, livelihoods and communities must suffer to allow someone else a marginal advantage or a lower price.
Ministers are finally beginning to see what the trade negotiators warned them about four years ago and as I have consistently said over the last three years I have been writing this blog, at the end nobody will be happy.
The fourth round of talks end today. I look forward to the press conferences. They really should be compulsive viewing.
