I assume it is just the start of Singham expunging from history much of what he said in the last five years since 90% of it is being proved wrong. This is North's tweet:
"British goods will not be stopped at the border – they will enter the EU on the same WTO terms which China, the United States, and Australia currently use"Shanker Singham— Dr Richard North (@RichardAENorth) February 18, 2021
Singham was responding to these wise and prescient words of George Osborne:
“Let’s make sure that we go on doing trade with our biggest export market. Otherwise withdrawing from the single market will be the biggest single act of protectionism in the history of the United Kingdom. And no amount of trade deals with New Zealand are going to replace what we do at the moment with our big European neighbours.”
Singham, then chair of the Legatum Institute’s Special Trade Commission, wrote the article which begins with this:
“The challenge we face is that by not understanding what is actually on offer, or throwing up straw man arguments, we will fail because our hesitancy will constrain our ambition.” - Shanker Singham
He goes on to claim that leaving the SM and the CU would not impact trade and North captures it with two killer quotes from Singham's piece:
"While membership in the single market currently provides the UK with the opportunity to trade goods at a zero-tariff rate across the EU, free trade agreements provide the same benefits."
And:
"British goods will not be stopped at the border – they will enter the EU on the same WTO terms which China, the United States, and Australia currently use"
I have given various presentations in my career which sometimes ended in Q&A sessions. I confess I wasn't very good at it since I'm not a naturally confident person or a skilled public speaker but I've managed a few in my time. I always did them in terror with the thought that at the end somebody in the audience would ask a question that I couldn't answer - or worse - say something which demolished my whole argument. Thankfully it never happened but it didn't stop me having nightmares about it.
One of the reasons it never happened is that (a) I was careful not to stray into areas I knew nothing about and (b) I tried to research stuff so that nothing I said was really contentious. Anything for a quite life me.
Not so Shanker Singham. If I go to a website like DeSmog (HERE) this is what I learn about Singham:
Shanker Singham is a former US lobbyist who became a prominent figure in UK politics after the 2016 EU referendum. He has been described in the media as the “Brexiteers’ brain” for his close ties and “unparalleled access” to senior Eurosceptic politicians and ministers, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Steve Baker, Liam Fox and David Davis.
In July 2020, Singham was named a member of a newly-established Trade and Agriculture Commission advising International Trade Secretary Liz Truss on trade policies designed to maintain a “competitive” farming sector and high animal welfare and environmental standards.
He worked for two thinktanks with close ties to a network of groups lobbying for a deregulatory, “hard” Brexit based in and around offices at 55 Tufton Street in Westminster. He is a Fellow of International Trade and Competition at the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, having formerly been Director of its International Trade and Competition Unit.
His qualifications are in law, starting with the University of Miami through Guildford College of law and Balliol College, Oxford where he got an MA in 1990. Quite where his expertise in trade comes from isn't clear.
What is clear is that Singham hasn't got the first idea of what he's talking about. We know that now for sure because we can see that British goods are being stopped at the border (as WTO members' goods has been stopped for years) and that a free trade agreement does not offer the same benefits as the single market. Thousands of businesses are learning for the first time what non-tariff barriers are.
I don't recall anybody challenging Singham at the time, probably because not many people in the real world read his article. It was however all of a piece with his pro-Brexit philosophy and I assume it was what he was assuring Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Steve Baker, Liam Fox, David Davis and plenty of others in private.
As we now know he is dead wrong - a fact which is being hammered home every day as the terrible impact of Brexit sends companies to the wall and shifts trade into the EU - precisely as all the 'scaremongers' said it would.
What does it tell us? Not much except that Brexiteers - all of them - had no idea what they were unleashing on us. They relied on 'experts' who were nothing of the sort, men (they were mostly men) who spouted the sort of rubbish that reinforced their own prejudice and faith that the EU was holding us back and Brexit could be achieved at no cost.
The revelation won't make any difference of course to Singham. He is safely ensconced in the DIT as an adviser on trade to the International Trade Secretary, Liz Truss.
If nothing else it tells us how far you can go with self-confidence but zero knowledge or expertise in modern Britain.
