Britain will officially accede to the CPTPP on 15 December this year. This follows Peru becoming the sixth and final country to formally ratify the agreement to join a free trade area on the opposite side of the globe. Britain will trade under CPTPP terms from that date with the six members who have now ratified the agreement. They are Peru, Japan, Singapore, Chile, New Zealand and Vietnam. The other five (Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Brunei, and Mexico) will follow as they ratify. The government says the agreement could boost the UK economy by around £2 billion annually by 2040. It is not even a rounding error, but a flea bite on a fleabite in trade terms.
I mention this, not because it will make any positive economic difference but because it is the second example in my lifetime of Britain acceding to a bloc whose rules are already cast in concrete.
The agreement we became signatories to is 5,500 pages and 30 chapters long including various annexes and can be found on the New Zealand government website.
I assume nobody in British industry has read the whole thing in detail and are relying on what they’re told by ministers. What are the chances that there are things in the agreement which Britain will find difficult to swallow? Don’t forget the US pulled out of talks because the agreement “erodes sovereignty” or so a cross-party organisation called Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) argued in 2016.
The CPA said:
“The majority of the TPP’s 5,500 pages delve deeply into the domestic laws of the US and other signatory countries rather than traditional trade issues. Issues include government procurement, investment and banking, food and product safety rules, telecommunications, electronic commerce and administrative rulemaking. Whether you support the new TPP rules is not the issue. Whether the TPP rules impact our ability to govern ourselves under our constitutional system is the issue”.
A body of opinion in New Zealand opposes the TPP on the same grounds. A website devoted to it claims the treaty is “binding” on the partnership member nations, “overriding the domestic laws and constitutions of the individual countries – which must be brought into compliance with them”.
When we applied to join the EEC in the 1960s General De Gaulle vetoed both applications because the UK's farming practices had "made Britain incompatible with Europe" and that Britain harboured a "deep-seated hostility" to any pan-European project.
On the last point, he has been proved right. I suspect the CPTPP members may find the UK has a deep-seated hostility to any pan-nation project, be it in Europe or anywhere else. It is just part of the British psyche. But when we finally joined the EEC in 1973, we had to accept all of the pre-existing rules and regulations that the original six had already agreed on.
Some Brexiteers think CPTPP accession will make rejoining the EU more difficult, if not totally impossible. In short, they think we will be ‘shackled’ to a distant trading bloc, something they found intolerable when we were in the EU, a bloc much closer to home with whom we still do over half our external trade.
How long will it be before there are complaints that some aspects of the CPTPP are not compatible with the way we like to do things on these islands? What happens if some existing CPTPP members object to things we do that aren’t compliant with the terms of the CPTPP?
There is always in my experience a honeymoon period before and shortly after these formal agreements are entered into, when all is sweetness and light. This is usually because nobody - or more accurately hardly anybody - has bothered to read the details or taken the trouble to understand what are often boring but onerous and important conditions.
In 1973 for example there was euphoria in the UK press when we formally became a member of the EEC, but twenty years later all that had gone. Tory Eurosceptics were in the ascendancy, supported by the very right-wing press who had previously been among the cheerleaders for membership. This was all because officials in Brussels were trying to harmonise the single market by creating common rules and regulations.
Don't forget, a lot of leave voters now claim we voted in 1975 to join a common market, what they were unhappy about in 2016 was about actually being in a common market, with all that that entails. They like the idea of a common market but not the effort needed to build one.
Now, they have fallen in behind the belief that by joining a 'fast-growing' trade bloc on the other side of the world, we will somehow benefit more than being in the EU single market. However, the CPTPP is not 'fast-growing' at all, we already have trade deals with the biggest CPTPP nations and even the government is claiming the added benefits are virtually negligible.
So, when the downsides start to emerge, domestic producers are undercut, businesses are forced to close and the trade gap widens, I expect there will be growing unhappiness and cries that we were misled.
I don’t believe the UK will be in the CPTPP very long, and I suspect the existing members know it. We will sooner or later rejoin the EU, although I don’t pretend this is going to happen very quickly. By the time we do rejoin, the acquis communitaire (the totality of EU law) will have expanded well beyond that which existed when we left.
When we do rejoin, we will be signing up once again to another great swathe of rules and regulations which we have had zero influence over. And you can be sure there will be opposition voices who will claim it’s all intolerable.
This is how we do things in this country.
