The row about the Australian trade deal is hotting up. The Times has an article claiming that Johnson Backs a free trade deal with Australia. The NFU's president Minette Batters has told Channel 4 News that she had received a "personal assurance" from the prime minister that he wouldn't let farmers down when securing post Brexit trade deals. I am only surprised that anyone believes a word he says. As the former Tory MP Nick Boles once tweeted he has betrayed everybody who ever trusted him. Ms Batters is just the latest.
The article says:
"Boris Johnson is prepared to offer Australia tariff-free access to British food markets despite warnings that it could put farmers out of business. The prime minister is backing a plan to give Australian food exporters the same terms as those enjoyed by the European Union in what would be the first bespoke trade deal signed by the government since Brexit.
"The plan is being resisted by farming groups, which believe that it would set a dangerous precedent for future trade agreements and could result in British farmers struggling to compete with cheap imports."
On Newsnight last night and tweeted by Tom Newton Dunn, a compromise proposal is coming out that would offer the Australians tariff free access but not quota free and the amounts would be limited by TRQ (Tariff Rate Quotas):
The longish thread claims "the Australians must then be told its TRQs on beef and lamb or no deal, and then challenged to bring down the whole thing over that one element."
I wouldn't be surprised if the Australians say no. They are in the stronger position and they know it. Trade negotiations are difficult precisely because they involve painful economic and political decisions to open up your markets and expose businesses to the chill wind of foreign, and perhaps cheaper competition, in return for getting access to someone else's market for your most competitive goods.
This is the British way of negotiating by the way. Make a demand and if the other side don't accept it gratefully they are responsible for talks breaking down. It worked so well with the EU didn't it?
If the Aussies can't use the leverage they have now they will never find themselves in such a strong position again. Johnson and Truss are absolutely desperate to get a trade deal settled by the time of the G7 summit in Cornwall on 11 June. The clock is ticking once more.
Many farmers who wanted to escape the unpopular CAP may be disappointed to discover what the government is now doing with the new found 'sovereignty' that they chose to give it. Brussels did more to protect them that their own government. You give a man with a 100 per cent reputation for betrayal the power to betray you and lo and behold, he betrays you. Who would have believed it?
Daniel Hannan (now Lord Hannan) has his usual John Bull style of
article in The Telegraph urging Johnson to betray farmers.
A UK-Australia FTA is nothing more than a restoration of the natural order, he says and asks, "Who could possibly oppose an ambitious trade deal with such a close ally? One might ask the same question about the EU and Brexit, but he answers his own question:
"Several people, it turns out. First, those who dislike trade on principle, either on anti-capitalist grounds or because of the misplaced fad for self-sufficiency. Then those who have learned to make a living from the existing dispensation and are fretful about any change. Then some resentful Remainers who, consciously or unconsciously, can’t bear the thought of a post-EU Britain thriving. Finally, there is the force of sheer bureaucratic inertia – what Milton Friedman (on a visit to Australia, appropriately enough) called “the tyranny of the status quo”.
"These groups have converged on the issue of agricultural protectionism. Their operatives are National Farmers’ Union officials, the Defra blob and a handful of Tory backwoodsmen. Their campaign organ seems to be the Mail on Sunday which has become almost deranged in its hostility to imports."
The 'misplaced' fad for self-sufficiency is one that other ultra Brexiteer John Redwood has been banging on about for months. Perhaps they might want to get their ideas straight. We weren't self sufficient in PPE when the pandemic broke or in vaccine production. No country can be self-sufficient in everything but in the basic things, as far as possible, we should be. You can live without a BMW, an electric sandwich maker or some cheap plastic gizmo for turning socks inside out. But food, water, energy, clean air and the like, you can't.
In food, inside the 'protectionist' EU, Britain has extremely low food costs. Only the
USA spends less of their total household expenditure on food. Yet Hannan wants us to spend even less and wipe out a lot of farmers in the process.
He employs this bizarre argument to persuade UK farmers:
"We should be winning new markets. Beef sells here for around half the price it fetches in Japan or South Korea. We think of these places as being closer to Australia and New Zealand than to Britain, but the distances are comparable. Rank-and-file farmers know it, even if their Euro-nostalgic spokesmen affect not to."
So, we eat cheap meat coming 12,000 miles from Australia and send our home produced beef 8,000 miles to Japan and South Korea. Either Aussie beef is lower quality or it's not. If it's the same why would Japan buy from us? If it's of lower quality why should we be expected to have it here? And is it right to ship food half way around the world anyway.
Hannan argues the carbon footprint for sea transport is small and I don't know if he's right or not but the meat has to be kept refrigerated for weeks if not months - at both ends and during the journey. It just doesn't seem very green to me.
Finally, the idiot Frost appeared before the House of Lords EU affairs committee yesterday and although I watched a bit of it I didn't see it all. He apparently told peers that an SPS deal with the EU would be hard to accept because we need to do trade deals with the likes of Australia.
Britain's farmers may soon be in the position of becoming uncompetitive in the European market due to the lack of an SPS deal, thus damaging their business, in order for the government to sign a trade deal with Australia with cheap products coming in, thus further damaging their business. It is a lose-lose situation. Why do it?
