Trade in food is not a special case, we can and will have free trade - beef and liberty.

 The great schisms in conseravtive party thinking have always been, in one way or another, about the cause of free trade. The repeal of the corn laws, for the first time placing feeding people ahead of the financial interests of landowners, pretty near destroyed the party and it was rescued only by replacing the nationalism of protectionism with the jingoism of Empire plus a commitment to put the interests of working people first and foremost.

The party repeated this clash over Imperial Preference again settling for, pretty much, the case of trade over the interests of traders. And for a long while (you'd not believe it to listen to many Brexiteers) the Conservative Party supported our involvement in the evolving European Union because it extended free trade and free exchange to a wider market. It only became a problem when this emerging union began to be more controlling, more protectionist and more interventionist.

Gently and quietly the Conservative Party is tiptoeing away from free trade. For all the fine pro-trade words of Liz Truss, there's a growing body of opinion that believes the way to deliver of the promise to people in those "Red Wall" seats is to embrace as rehashed version of Empire Preference where protectionism applies to all but those privileged by trade deals and where certain sectors, 'strategic' industries, are wholly protected in a vain endeavour to save jobs in struggling firms.

The first salvos in this new war were fired during the consideration of an Agriculture Bill where Labour and some backwoodsman Conservatives sought to amend the bill so "no food could be imported to the UK that is produced to lower standards than food made in Britain". It all sounds good doesn't it, but, as Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger points out, this "...would criminalise a lot of current imports from Europe and Africa, and impose an impossible expectation on our trading partners".

The problem is that Kruger, one of the brightest of the 2019 intake of Conservative MPs, then does some protectionist triangulation on the basis that we can't have "beef and liberty":

In free market theory the interests of producers are subordinate to those of consumers. In agriculture things are not so simple. The objective of food policy should not be ever-cheaper food: we already have the third-cheapest food in the world, after the US and Singapore...

Let's start with the core of this argument - the objective shouldn't be "ever-cheaper food". Can someone explain to me why not? Kruger invokes a sort of bucolic mysticism in explaining this - "...the almost spiritual identification of the nation with the land, its look and feel...", as if stopping us buying cheap Argentinian beef is the only way to maintain this visceral link to the land.

Kruger's argument seems to be that, since we can all afford to pay more for food, there's no sense in making people better off by using trade to secure cheaper food (so we can spend the money we'd otherwise have spent on pricey beef on trips to country pubs or hiring canal boats on the Kennet and Avon). In the end the core of the argument here isn't about the consumer but about a tiny part of Britain's economy - beef farmers.

The next imperative is to stop our farmers being too badly undercut by inferior cheap imports.

The operative word here isn't "inferior" but "cheap". I'm sure that the Brazilian, Argentinian or Texan beef farmer is just as inordinately proud of his product as the Wiltshire farmers Danny Kruger represents. And it's for us, the consumer, to make the judgement about whether the beef the gauchos and cowboys in the New World produce is inferior to the beef farmed on those lush fields outside Devizes.

If British beef is so good then it should not need protection. I spent a few seconds making sure I got the right brand of tinned tomatoes the other day because, although they're 50% more expensive, they're much better quality. The argument that, by making nasty foreign beef more expensive through tariffs and regulations, we make it a level playing field is, quite simply, to stick two fingers up at consumers. As Kruger paraphrases Labour agriculture spokesman, Daniel Zeichman:

"...lovely sustainably-farmed British food for the rich, and cheap foreign muck for the masses."

The masses - ordinary families - are expected to pay more for their food so as to indulge grand folk wanting sustainably-farmed, grass-fed, high-welfare, lovingly-carved, well-hung, stroked, mollycoddled and much-loved beef from cheery farmers in new Range Rovers.

The imperative of cheaper imports is that our beef farmers have either to produce their beef more cheaply or else use the magic of marketing to tell the public that that Dorset, grass-fed beef really is worth paying more for. Instead, through the offices of a union, these farmers choose to lobby politicians so as to fix the market, to, in effect, impose a tax on consumers to the benefit of relatively wealthy beef farmers in Wiltshire.

Kruger says "Tories have to choose between beef and liberty". I say this is not so, we can and should have both. We fought this battle nearly 200 years ago, we fought is again 100 years ago, we need to fight it again and, on behalf of the ordinary family, come out strongly and proudly in favour of free trade. We can and will have beef AND liberty.

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Free trade is not a policy...

Excellent exposition on free trade from Jon Murphy:

...since free trade is no policy, it is not dependent upon the assumptions of the economic models to function... None of the arguments for free trade require perfect information, identical principles between buyers and sellers, known utility functions and universal preferences, etc. Free trade is robust to deviations from the ideal; the system still works because it is a process, not a policy. Deviations from the ideal, movements away from equilibrium, present opportunities for entrepreneurs to correct issues; the many plan for the many and do not require the guiding hand of government to correct for deviations.

And this, especially, on using models to guide policy:

To guide policy, you need a descriptive model, not an analytical model. In other words, you need a model that is descriptive of reality, not one that reflects reality. When attempting to guide policy, this is where the assumptions of the model become important. To impose an “optimal tariff,” you need to know the demand and supply curves (something which is unknowable), you need to know indifference curves and von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions (which are unknowable), true relative prices and equilibrium, etc etc.

Go read and learn.

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It's not capitalism we need to defend, it's freedom

Every now and then I get asked about why I'm in politics and, once I've done the self-deprecating bit about how no other business would have me, I get to the crunch. I am involved because free speech, free markets, free trade and free enterprise need defending. The systems of government, the lobby groups, the business organisations, the voluntary sector and 'thinking people everywhere' all conspire to limit and restrict your and my freedom to act. Challenging this sad truth is essential.

And the problem isn't capitalism, it's government. This isn't to say that big business is innocent - the amounts spent by business on lobbying government for law changes, subsidy, new trade barriers and more regulation remind us that many large organisations really don't like the idea of freedom. So when Corbyn-loving students tell me capitalism is corrupting, I get their point - hardly a day passes without one or other example of a big business getting some sort of protectionist fix or some new regulation aimed at preventing market entry. We've known this for a long while - it's the central theme of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - mercantilism, market fixing, cartels and protectionism, all those things the technocrats try to justify, prevent the growth of wealth, the opportunity for equality and the raising of people out of poverty.

I also understand how those young people are disgruntled at being 'Generation Rent', at having great fat student debt they probably won't pay off and at seeing my generation sitting snuggly on a pile of assets (but still moaning at having to use those assets to look after ourselves in our old age). But when Corbyn or other socialists try to say that these problems are some how a consequence of free markets, free trade or free enterprise, they are lying - even when they use the catch-all term of capitalism.

Housing in London is expensive because for sixty years we've run urban containment policies around the capital and for forty of those sixty years, London has generated more new jobs than it has new houses. And if you provide just six new homes for every ten new households, housing is going to get more expensive. This isn't the fault of the market, it's the fault of government for rationing the land we've got to build houses on. They call this planning and it's the basic building block of socialism - instead of having a free market, some folk in an office with a computer model decide what the price should be, how much should be made and how it should be distributed. It limits your freedom and it doesn't work.

Defending freedom is not, therefore, simply about the moral imperative of liberty but is justified for straightforward and practical reasons. Those freedoms - speech, trade, markets, enterprise - should be defended because they work, because they are the things that made us rich and, right now, are making poor people everywhere richer. The only places - North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe - where people are getting poorer are places where these freedoms are comprehensively rejected. Places where socialism - the planned economy - is the chosen model.

Everywhere I look freedom is under attack. Technocrats and business lobbyists saying import tariffs protect domestic business. Local councils saying limiting procurement options supports local economies. Planners saying the problem is the wrong plan not the planning itself. Farmers saying they couldn't operate without subsidy. Public health groups wanting to ban smoking in parks or to fix booze prices. Police forces calling for new powers to seemingly arrest anybody for almost anything. Housing lobbyists saying the solution is to fix rents not to build houses. Schools snatching sausage rolls from innocent children's lunchboxes. Mayors enforcing public morals by banning pretty women from advertising or drinking from the train.

And then we're told the problem is capitalism? It's not, the problem is that government - in cahoots with a bewildering lobby of charities, businesses and 'campaigners' - takes away freedoms. And we can't subdivide these freedoms - be cross about the loss of one freedom that's important to us while cheering on a ban on something we don't like. For sure some of these losses of freedom are less damaging than others but each loss - from daft rules on advertising vaping to 'Public Space Protection Orders' that make anything an official doesn't like a crime - represents a further restriction and another barrier to pleasure, enterprise or exchange.

I'm happy to defend capitalism - the idea that the rewards from business success goes to the people who put up the cash - but it's not as important as defending free markets, free trade, free enterprise and free speech. Those freedoms constrain the worst urges of business, protect us from the busybody and limit the oppressive instincts of government. We have become too glib about each new loss of freedom - even sometimes to the point of welcoming it because of the NHS or crime or community safety or, the favourite all-purpose reason, because of the children.

So let's get less hung up about whether something's owned by the people who invested, by the workforce or by the community and worry instead about those who want to take away your freedom to organise business how you want. Let's be bothered about government and business wanting to fix gas prices or food supply or where you can buy gin and lemonade. The good life we enjoy and that we'd like everyone to enjoy, was made possible by that free enterprise, by those free markets, and by that free trade. And underpinning all this is free speech - our right to speak what we see as truth, to promote our business and to challenge the assumptions and presumptions of those who govern us. Freedom matters - let's defend it.

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Why free trade....

There's too much technocratic mumbo jumbo about trade. Not least the dribbling nonsense that trade is something permitted by government rather than something prevented by government.

Here's the deal - it's pretty simple:

The argument for free trade is not (as some protectionists caricature it) that it creates heaven on earth; the argument is not that free trade is sufficient or even necessary for sustained and widespread economic growth; the argument is not that every instance of trade being made freer works in textbook fashion. Instead, the foundational argument for free trade is that a government’s obstruction of its citizens’ voluntary commercial transactions with foreigners denies to its citizens gains from trade no less than its obstruction of its citizens’ voluntary commercial transactions with each other. In short, the foundational case for free trade is that trade that spans across political borders improves people’s economic well-being no less than does trade that occurs domestically.

You can make all sorts of reasons why not having free trade might be justified. But you really can't argue that free trade makes folk less well off - that's a straight up lie.

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A truly global economy...

From Don Boudreaux:

A truly global economy is simply what happens when governments do not obstruct their citizens’ decisions to trade with foreigners. Each of these countless decisions will be made in light of each buyer’s and each seller’s assessment of the benefits and costs of trading with foreigners as compared to trading with fellow citizens. If, for example, an American retailer believes that the benefits to it of buying inventories from foreign factories are higher than the costs (including the risks) of doing so, it will buy from foreign factories. Competition at the retail level then ensures that these lower costs are passed on to domestic consumers in the form of lower prices or higher product quality (or both). If this retailer discovers that its initial assessment is mistaken, it will stop buying from those foreign factories or it and the foreign factories will re-arrange the details of their contracts. In either case there is no call for government to artificially restrict the retailer’s – or any other of its citizens’ – freedom to engage in commerce with foreigners.

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In all this trade talk let's not forget that we're rich because we're free

It starts like this:

At the end of last year, a news story was published with huge implications for ‘international development’: a drop-off in commodity prices through 2016 dashed hopes that the world’s poorest countries could escape extreme poverty by the end of the decade.

The story raises a critical question directly linked to what Brexit will mean for countries of the global South and the reality of what ‘free trade’ and protectionism mean in the context of economic development – a reality brought into sharper relief in recent weeks by a long-running spat over trade at the G20 and Liam Fox’s focus on signing tariff-free trade agreements around the world.

And then goes rapidly down hill. The thing that beats me is why people who tell me that they 'care' about the world's poorest are so trapped in the belief that more open trade is making the 'world's poorest countries' less well off. Let's start with the facts:

The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original MDGs—such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early.

The main reason for this wonderful decline in world poverty is the recognition that open markets, more free trade, property rights and good economic governance are the necessary prerequisites for reducing poverty. Bear in mind that the natural state of humankind is grinding poverty. Up to around 1700 - a little earlier in Holland - nearly everyone lived and had always lived in what we'd describe today as absolute, abject poverty. Since that time, courtesy of us recognising that if you allow people to prosper by innovation the whole of society benefits, average incomes in the UK and other developed nations have risen - in cash terms - by a factor of at least sixteen. If we take account of what that innovation means - the thousands of things that make our everyday lives better ("dentistry" as P J O'Rourke put it) - then that factor of sixteen is truly much higher.

Now free trade isn't the reason for that growth in our living standards (nor, for that matter, is the shocking colonial exploitation of the 100 years from roughly 1850 to1950) but it is one of the things that contributes to the, sadly belated, opportunity for those countries that missed out on the first economic revolution to secure the sort of living standards even the poorest in Britain enjoy. And much of it will be about those institutional reforms, the list of things governments shouldn't do, enabling people to do business (again - property rights, good economic governance, free markets). But trade matters and the more free that trade the better.

So we don't want this sort of nonsense:

But the UK must go further. Brexit trade policies will do little for longer term economic change in the South unless poor countries can export processed or manufactured goods with similar preferential schemes, or, conversely, use tariffs to shield emerging industries from international competition. On top of this, the Northern-led agenda of using trade deals to privatise public services and grant corporations legal powers to sue states outside national jurisdictions offers little in the fight against poverty.

I agree the UK must go further and absolutely agree that the sort of protectionism that forces developing countries into exporting raw produce rather than processed goods (as I once asked, 'why aren't we eating Ghanaian chocolate bars?') is a bad idea all round. But the next part - tariffs and import substitution - is a return to the days before 1980, before the dramatic drop in the world's poverty, before the triumph of what's now called neoliberalism. And being able to go to an independent court for arbitration is a protection not an affront to liberty - without giving people and businesses the power to challenge government there is no check on arbitrary decisions by that government.

I also agree that 'trade deals' and especially bilateral trade deals are not free trade. Indeed the fact of the 'trade deal' between two governments (or groups of governments) is a reminder of the degree to which trade is not free. For sure a lot of so-called trade deals are really about regulatory harmonisation (sweetened by public procurement bungs in both directions) but they do not represent the ideal of allowing, in a well-governed economy, people to trade freely. This means, since trade is about consumption rather than production - imports not exports, allowing people to purchase the things they want with their own resources from whoever, wherever they wish.

Over the past 40 or so we've not talked much about trade. There has been occasional bits of political posturing about the 'balance of trade' and a great deal of macho talk about 'the global race' and 'competition' between nations but not much about actual trade. Or indeed the fact that it is nonsense to, for example, argue for a ban on live animal exports without realising that there's no difference between taking a truck load of sheep from Canterbury to Cannes or from Basingstoke to Aberdeen (at least not for the sheep). And a thousand other examples of how doing business - buying and selling, securing mutual benefit, adding value - shouldn't be different if the supplier is in Ulan Bator or Uttoxeter.

The result of us not talking about trade is that people begin to believe this sort of nonsense (completely unsupported by economic history):

...this obscures the fact that rich countries only pursued free trade after they ascended to the peak of the global economy; they used protectionism to ensure that domestic industries grew ahead of being exposed to competition, before “kicking away the ladder” they used to get to their dominant positions.

Not only does this line not make sense (if protectionism worked then there was no ladder to kick away) but it really isn't true. In the UK you only have to look at the 30 year long row over fixing grain prices with Corn Laws or the rows about 'Empire Preference' to see that there's nothing new at all about political arguments between mercantilists and free traders. And most of the time - witness steel, food, cars, even second-hand washing machines and old clothes - the protectionists, the mercantilists, win the argument.

Brexit really does mean a chance to do it differently. I appreciate that the absolutist position (remove all the tariffs on stuff we buy) may be correct in theory but we should remember it also removes the opportunity for reciprocity by governments - takes away a little of their power. Meaning it won't happen. But, since most of the barriers to trade are regulatory (or outright bans as is the case with much of European trade policy), the presence or otherwise of tariffs is pretty marginal - we lose a little by scrapping them but it allows us to get focused on improving economic governance in developing countries by helping them improve their standards of regulatory enforcement and compliance.

Free trade is a very good idea but the regime we have in world trade today is not free trade. We're a lot better than we used to be - the GATT Agreements and their child, the World Trade Organisation, helped make this the case as did the growth in international regulatory co-operation spawned by GATT - but the focus remains on the inter-governmental fix, on grand folk meeting in summits to decide whether or not some women somewhere will be allowed to sell you cocoa powder, knitted comfort blankets or large amounts of steel. If we can change this then we'll have a more free, more happy and above all richer world - all of it.

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"They can pay more for their food" - Jay Rayner meets Marie-Antoinette

I'm going to leave aside accusations of vanity, self-promotion and smugness because we are all guilty of such vices. I'm going to focus instead on the vexed question of whether it is ever morally defensible to argue that governments should enact policies people should pay more for something as fundamental as the food we eat.

Here's the argument:

British consumers have become too used to food being sold too cheaply. In an age of austerity when many are struggling it is a tricky argument to make, but the fact remains. We need an agriculture sector in a position to invest in its base to help improve our productivity and therefore our self-sufficiency. The 10% of income (down from 20% in 1970) that we spend on food does not enable that. Many may find this unpalatable but the fact is this: unless we improve our self-sufficiency, we will be at the complete mercies of those international markets. Unless we pay a little more now, we risk paying vastly more later. This is an argument that farmers, retailers and the Government needs to engage with.

This is the core of an argument made by food writer, Jay Rayner, as a sort of cod justification for refusing to give the benefit of his knowledge and expertise to the UK Government. Now I know most people think Rayner's article is about the unfolding terrors of Brexit but it isn't, it's about how Rayner thinks the UK (note the UK not Europe or the EU) needs to be more self-sufficient in its production of food because lots of terrible things might happen if we're not - most of which, surprisingly, is about food prices:

...the UK sits with dwindling self-sufficiency, in a stormy world in which food has become one of the great economic battlegrounds. Added to that is the appalling folly of Brexit, forced through by a cabal of ideologues happy to trot out falsehoods about the sunny uplands of economic joy that leaving the European Union would bring.

Instead it has resulted in a devaluation of the pound, making imports more expensive and the exporting of our food more attractive.

If, as many fear, a bad deal is done for Britain resulting in huge tariffs and penalties on trade, food price inflation is going to be in double digits for years to come. That’s if we can get hold of food at all. The people who will suffer the most, of course, are those who already have the least. For them the buying of food will use up a massive proportion of their expendable income.

Now there are a few things here that do rather matter with the first being the presumption that a UK government would impose "huge tariffs and penalties" on trade in food. And, given that this would be necessary to have the policy he wants of greater self-sufficiency, why he has such a problem with such impositions? Or, to put the question a different way, how does Rayner propose to increase the proportion of UK food consumption produced in the UK? And wouldn't this be completely impossible if we remained a member of the EU?

To give Rayner his due, he refuses to wholly embrace the 'supermarkets are totally evil' line used by many of those supporting his mission of expensive food. Rayner also slaps down the urban growing fad:

They are interesting educationally. Allotments are good for mental wellbeing and general fitness. But the carbon footprint of the food produced tends to be appalling.

The problem is that, in criticising localism, Rayner undermines the basis for his argument on food production and self-sufficiency.

...do not be fooled by environmental arguments around localism. What matters most when judging environmental impact of food production is the full life cycle: you need to look at the carbon (and other inputs) not just of the trucks getting produce from field to fork, but in the farm buildings and machinery, the fertilisers and the workforce.

It's hard to find a more compelling argument for international free trade in agriculture than this one. A world where food is grown in the place most suited to its production rather in a less fertile location just across the road. If food miles aren't the problem (Rayner cites transport costs as 2% to 4% of total food cost) then what are the arguments for self-sufficiency at any level below the whole world?

It seems to me that Rayner, if he is to make his argument for remaining in the EU, has to recognise that the shared competence on agriculture needs to be viewed at the level of the whole union not individual member countries. And just so we're clear what this means:

It turns out that the EU is not self-sufficient in terms of all the nutrients normally locked in agricultural products and principally available for different usages: The respective self-sufficiency ratio is only 91 per cent.

I hate to make Rayner's pro-remain argument better than he does but being 91% self-sufficient in food is better than being less than 50% self-sufficient in food - and this is without any change at all to our current approach on food prices. Rayner makes a localised and protectionist argument (one that, incidentally couldn't be achieved if we stayed in the EU) focusing solely on UK food production rather than EU food production within a single market.

Rayner doesn't set out how his proposal to increase food prices, perhaps even to double those food prices will be achieved. It seems from his article that the model is essentially to dramatically reduce the area under production through environmental regulation and, therefore, to increase the costs to UK farmers. Obviously such a policy can only be achieved if two things are done: huge tariffs amounting to de facto import bans on foods that can only be produced expensively in the UK and the introduction of VAT on food so as to fund, in part, the subsidies necessary to sustain newly uneconomic farm businesses. And, to be blunt, no government is going to get away with imposing a huge tax on food, so the only way to deliver Rayner's policy is through preventing (or at best, severely restricting) imports of food. Fans of the corn laws will be delighted!

It shouldn't surprise us that Rayner doesn't get to the financial and economic logic of his argument (preferring instead horror stories about horsemeat and vague suggestions that the European Food Safety Agency, EFSA, regime would be scrapped) because it makes almost no sense at all. Not only does the logic of his argument about the EU tell us we are already more-or-less self-sufficient but also that doubling food prices has to involve a massive tax hike on food.

To return to where we started - is it morally justified to argue for government action to hugely increase food prices? For my part, I don't think it is an ethically defensible argument. Food is essential (and especially the basic nutrients Rayner considers when he talks of the 2007/8 food price spike) and government should prioritise policies that reduce prices such as relaxing planning rules to allow more efficient supermarkets. Rayner, like Tim Lang, the lefty food policy wonk of choice, fails entirely to see that the very people who lose under their policies are the poorest. And to suggest otherwise as Rayner does, is to propagate a terrible misrepresentation - the massive hike in prices his policies demands can only reduce the quality of life for millions of families in Britain. I'll be OK, Jay Rayner will be OK, but the poorest and most vulnerable in our society won't be OK.

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Tim Montgomerie perhaps needs to learn the difference between business and markets

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Montgomerie is on about Donald Trump and, in the main his little article is pretty much spot on. Except for this bit:

Conservative Brits may look on in amazement — but it’s worth remembering that Trump does have a point. It wasn’t Karl Marx who accused leading business people of being ‘all for themselves, and nothing for other people’. It wasn’t Friedrich Engels who condemned the ‘mean rapacity’ and ‘sneaking arts’ of many merchants and manufacturers. It was Adam Smith. The father of modern economics wasn’t an uncritical defender of free enterprise. He knew that markets could lead to extraordinary selfishness.

Or rather the last bit. Markets, where they are allowed to operate freely, are not selfish because they depend on the mutual benefit to buyer and seller. Nor was Adam Smith against free markets or even critical of free markets. What Adam Smith hated was mercantilism and the cartel, the core economic position of what I call 'business conservatives'. Sometimes this gets called 'crony capitalism' (a term widely used to illustrate what goes on in the US system and in the EU but was first coined to describe the rapacious kleptocracies of Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia).

We should be now have learned the lesson Tony Blair taught conservatives - that the old adage of the business conservative, "what's good for business is good for the nation", doesn't apply. It is what is good for consumers - for the people - that matters and we know that, in economic terms, 'good for the people' almost always equates to free enterprise and free trade. What Smith railed against was that businesses clubbed together to fix markets, that they pressured governments to introduce protectionism, and that they supported regulations that prevented new competition from developing. For Smith free trade and free enterprise were the solution not the problem.

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Fair trade and the keeping of peasants in their place

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The other day the fine town of Keighley was celebrating achieving "fair trade" status. In truth not everyone in Keighley was celebrating this new shiny mark of goodness. Indeed most of the population of Keighley neither know nor care about it's "fair trade" status. However, for those Keighley folk (what do you call someone from Keighley - Keighleyite, Byworthian) who care here's what it means:

A Fairtrade Town is a town, city, village, island, borough, county, zone, district or region that has made a commitment to supporting Fairtrade and using products with the FAIRTRADE Mark. 

The good people who run the "fair trade" campaign provide a handy action plan for getting to be a "fair trade town" which elaborates further:

Fairtrade is about bringing the farmer and the shopper closer together. It’s about putting people at the heart of trade. Becoming a Fairtrade Town sends a powerful message about how your community wants trade to work and will directly benefit some of the world’s poorest farmers and workers through increasing awareness and sales of Fairtrade in your area.

Brilliant stuff - by searching out that little logo, by persuading the greasy spoon cafe to serve the approved sort of coffee we are making the world a little better and those poor farmers a little less poor. Crack open the bubbly, hoist some bunting and let's have a party. Let's celebrate our municipal goodness!

But hang on. What exactly are we doing here? Is this the best way to make the lives of poor people elsewhere in the world a little better? Or is it just a marketing scam dreamt up to assuage our guilty Western consciences?

It's a bit of both really - the fans of fair trade argue that is it a better model (with its co-ops and supposed transparency) when compared to traditional free trade models (with their nasty bad businesses and entrepreneurs) but there's no evidence that this is the case (pdf):

The benefits claimed by Fair Trade can also be obtained from the normal business relationships that exist between primary product producers and buyers. Attempts by proponents of Fair Trade to denigrate free trade and normal market practices are not helpful and distort realities.

More worryingly, especially in Latin America, "fair trade" does little or nothing to support the very poorest (because those very poorest are landless and dependent on plantation agriculture). Indeed, it could be argued that "fair trade", by preferring the products from (relatively better off) smallholders, acts to increase the risks of destitution for those landless workers.


However, the scale of "fair trade" is such that such impact is marginal - there isn't enough of it to have sufficient of a negative effect on the established trading models. So my biggest concern is that, far from helping smallholder farmers, "fair trade" acts to trap them in essentially uneconomic conditions - they remain poor compared to us guilt-ridden Westerners but are stuck in a condition that merely sustains that relative poverty.


To support me here's a reference from the Guardian:

...economist Paul Collier argues that Fairtrade effectively ensures that people "get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty". Fairtrade reduces the incentive to diversify crop production and encourages the utilisation of resources on marginal land that could be better employed for other produce. The organisation also appears wedded to an image of a notional anti-modernist rural idyll. Farm units must remain small and family run, while modern farming techniques (mechanisation, economies of scale, pesticides, genetic modification etc) are sidelined or even actively discouraged.

The success of the "fair trade" model hinges on the success of the Fairtrade Foundation's marketing campaigns - so long as the marketing message ("Fairtrade is Ethical and if you adopt it you are good people") succeeds the model succeeds. But back on the farm we have locked peasants into the peasant agriculture we ought to be helping them escape.

This is all part of a core development message (although to call it's outcome 'development' is to turn the meaning of the word on its head) proposed by organisations such as Oxfam - that we should subsidise subsistence farming as a protection against supply problems (drought, flood etc.) in order to allow for development.

I don't know about you but this does rather smack of keeping peasants in their place, scratting away trying to feed their families and dying at 45. Indeed the entire bien pensant development world is riddled with people promoting some sort of Maoist peasant idyll rather than looking at what happened elsewhere. In the elsewhere with the cars, TVs, computers and so forth that those peasants would like too. In that elsewhere we didn't (at least until recently) subsidise the subsistence farm but rather we encouraged mergers, enclosures and the development of commercial agriculture.

And "fair trade" is part of this corrupted idea of development, of an idea that guilty rich folk should simply hand over extra cash so that people farming ever more marginal land don't starve to death. An idea of development that proposes the use of Western wealth to keep peasants as peasants and then guilt-trips us into coughing up charity to do just that.

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Capitalism works and we should celebrate

After all there's an International Workers Day, why not an International Capitalism Day.

Here in England we've got rather used to being told just how bad capitalism is. And how a decent society is only possible because of the control and regulations placed on that capitalism by the benevolent hand of the government. There's sort of a point to this argument - it justifies government (and the millions it employs to administer those controls and regulations) and it reminds us that we can never be completely free.

But what is missing in all this is a celebration. Something that recognises just how fantastic capitalism has been for us, how it allowed us to escape from the bitter toil of subsistence agriculture, how is gave us wages to spend and, in time, a surplus from those wages to spend on pleasure. We seem to have forgotten just what capitalism did for us.

Fortunately, we get a glimpse still of capitalism's wonders:

"There have been big changes," she said, sitting in her office on an industrial estate 20 miles from the city's market. "Yiwu is changing every year - new buildings, new markets, new products and also many new customers." Yu Hexi, 52, the manager of Yiwu Beautiful Life Flower Co. Ltd a local firm that makes the imitation flowers that adorn the heads of women across Europe has fared even better.

"I never imagined, or even dared to imagine, that I would enjoy such a good life now," he said. His parents were once part of a rural Communist production team. Now, he runs a company with an annual turnover of more than half a million pounds.

"When I was little, we were really, really poor. My parents were peasants.

We didn't have enough food. Now our family has three cars. We built the best house in our village.

Multiply Yu Hexi's experience a million times and you get an idea of what capitalism is doing for China - and, because we're buying the things those Chinese businesses are making - for us too.

But it's not just the people who run the businesses, it's the workers too:

"There have been big changes in recent decades," she added, without pausing from her packing duties on the production line. "The city is getting better year after year. The most important change for me is that more factories are bringing more job opportunities." Shen Youfeng, 52, who works in the factory alongside her 18-year-old daughter, Feng Xueqing

More jobs, rising wages, the benefits of urban life and the chance to progress through education, hard work or both. This is what that capitalism brings to China and what we should be celebrating because we only have those things today because of capitalism.

The evidence of the last three decades - a time of unprecedented improvement in the lives of the world's poorest people - tells us that the idea of a free market, of free trade and of capitalism provides the sort of social and economic improvement we want for everyone. Yet we never pop open the champagne corks or put out the bunting to celebrate what free enterprise and free trade has brought the world.

If you want to reduce poverty then go buy things made by poor people in poor countries. And this is also why everyone who is even vaguely lefty in outlook, even a tiny bit concerned about improving the lot of the poor, should be pro-trade, pro-globalisation, in short, should be neoliberal capitalist running pig dogs intent on exploiting the labour of the poor.

And the reason for this is that it works.

Every other approach to improving the lives of the poor has failed. Every single one from socialism, fascism and communism to import substitution behind trade barriers and the grand state approach so loved by central African despots (and their French sponsors).

Capitalism may seem "unfair" - some people got pretty rich - but the deeper truth is that this unfairness is a chimera, a distraction from the real business of globalisation, free trade and free enterprise. And that business is making us all better off. Not just in economic terms but in every measure of human development. Free enterprise and free trade really do make our lives better. Every time.

Capitalism - free enterprise, free trade - made us rich. It's making the Chinese rich. And it will make Africans rich. Let's celebrate it just for once.

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Free trade...just do it

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I gather that we're (by which I mean our EU overlords) going to be chatting to Barak over the pond about a "free trade agreement":

It is good news that the United States and the European Union have confirmed that they are going to start formal talks about a new free-trade agreement. That President Obama announced the move in his State of the Union address reflects a profound personal evolution on the issue. 

We should all get terribly excited at the prospect of (following tortuous and seemingly endless negotiations) a deal that will get the damned Yankees to lift their tariffs on our stuff. Indeed we're told that lifting those tariffs is great:

...removing tariffs is predicted to generate an extra £115 billion within five years for both sides.

Think of the economic growth, the jobs and the businesses that will come from this trade! Consider the wonders that a transatlantic free trade zone would bring!

It's all nonsense - pretending that somehow we should care about what we export to the USA. What we should care about is the reason we have trade - so we can buy the lovely stuff they make over in Yankeeland. We don't need negotiations all we need to do is scrap our tariffs to reap the economic benefit of trade. Goods that are currently made more expensive by tariffs will be cheaper, domestic producers will be spurred to greater efficiency and innovation once they're kicked blinking into the sunlight of a free trade world.

And it really doesn't matter a jot whether the Americans do likewise.

Go on EU - just do it. The people will benefit and, while there'll be a bit of grumbling from agribusiness, from textiles folk and other protected industries, the positive effect on the economy will be palpable. We don't have to sign a treaty to get that £115 billion boost. All we have to do is scrap tariffs and other protectionist measures. Simple really.

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Hunger will disappear IF...we stop subsidising poverty and promote free trade

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This year, many of the world’s most powerful leaders will meet in the UK. They must change the future for millions of people who live with the day to day struggle against hunger. But that will only happen IF we get together and make them act.

So goes the blurb from the latest campaign to feed the starving and hungry. As ever, the campaign has roped in a cavalcade of the great and good – Desmond Tutu, Bill Gates and even pretty pop boys, One Direction. And we are enjoined – nay, demanded – to take part in the great campaign to feed the hungry! To take this message to the G8 – that hunger will disappear if:

• IF we give enough aid to stop children dying from hunger and help the poorest families feed themselves
• IF governments stop big companies dodging tax in poor countries, so that millions of people can free themselves from hunger
• IF we stop poor farmers being forced off their land and we grow crops to feed people not fuel cars
• IF governments and big companies are honest and open about their actions that stop people getting enough food

All sounds pretty good stuff doesn’t it folks! Until of course you actually think about it for a minute.

Firstly, this is 100 organisations – NGOs they like to call themselves until they ask us for money when they suddenly become charities – that are very interested in how much aid is given. And, of course, most of the aid does very little to “stop children dying of hunger” since governments prefer instead to prop up badly managed national budgets, lecture poor countries about climate change and, more of this in a minute, keep subsistence farmers trapped in subsistence farming.

Corporate tax-dodging is the issue du jour – no progressive campaign would be complete without a call for action on tax-dodging by “big” companies. It may be the case that large companies aren’t paying enough tax in Kenya or Peru but where is the connection with getting people out of hunger? Unless you live in a sort of Stalinist world where only the benign state can feed people (which didn’t work in the Ukraine or China, I seem to recall).

Now we get to the big issue – those big companies, secretly backed by the World Bank “behind the scenes”, as Oxfam put it, are buying up land and forcing farmers off that land so they can grow commercial crops (too many of which, because of our bonkers response to climate change are bio-fuels). Yes folks, you’ve guessed it – the reason for all those taxes is so we can pay poor farmers to stay poor farmers.

This is a monumentally stupid proposal – that very subsistence farming, dirt-scrabble and back-breaking, is the main reason why people in these places fall repeatedly into famine and starvation. We should be encouraging more efficient farming – after all Oxfam and their mates aren’t suggesting that we G8 residents step away from our computers and return to the land! Nor are these NGOs proposing that the big British or Canadian farms are broken up and handed out in parcels to city dwellers – doubtless with a hoe, a horse and a plough.

So why on earth do these organisations want to condemn this and future generations of Africans to live a short, unpleasant life scraping a bare existence from a tiny farm? Why do Oxfam and others believe that subsidising subsistence is the way to proceed? Why do all the great and good – the bishops, pop stars and philanthropists – think it fine for them to live a comfortable life with soft hands but that those Africans cannot aspire to be web designers, software writers or management consultants?

Why does this alliance for good not campaign for the G8 to make some changes that really will help those Africans out of poverty – things like removing agricultural tariffs and trade barriers, ending the subsidising of industrial agriculture and promoting trade rather than the dependence of aid?

I can only conclude that these campaigners believe Africans to be somehow different – that free markets and free trade won’t make them rich as they made us rich. Only through state direction and intervention will people be fed and the resources for this feeding will come from our taxes distributed to the grateful peasants of Ethiopia and Laos through the agency of Oxfam and others in the aid industry.

So I won’t be supporting this “If...” campaign – not because I don’t care but because the best way to stop Africans – and other poor people around the world – from starving is to do business with them, to set them free from the tyranny of subsistence and to promote free enterprise and free trade.

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Sorry Ms Moore, I'm right wing and I believe in freedom

There has, it seems, been some great debate amongst assorted "equalities" mongers - indeed the debate has descended into a row and from there spiralled down into political protest. And all because of something that Suzanne Moore said.

So the Guardian, seeking to pour oil upon these troubled waters, gives Ms Moore the space to explain herself (as it were). In doing so she launches into a justification founded on a belief in freedom:

...I feel increasingly freakish because I believe in freedom, which is easier to say than to achieve and makes me wonder if I am even of "the left" any more.

Of course, Ms Moore spends the rest of her article explaining how she's still a leftie really and that believing in freedom is a good thing. In doing this she can't resist positioning herself away from those on the right who claim to believe in freedom:

What we have is a few rightwingers who took some E in a field once and so claim to be libertarians, but are in fact Thatcherite misogynists. We have the double-think of "free schools", which exclude those who most need them. We have "freedom" for the very rich to take from the very poor while lecturing them on their moral poverty. We have women and gay people pushed into the conformity of lifelong monogamy, even though it clearly does not work for so many.

You see what Ms Moore has done here? That's right, she's parked the idea of free speech (that she claims to support) and sought to redefine freedom as something that cannot reside with the right. Now I'm a right-winger (although I never took an E in a field) and I don't recognise Ms Moore's argument. For sure, I've no time for those patronising sorts who want to judge the lifestyle choices of working-class people - you know the drinking, smoking and shagging. But I don't see this sort of middle-class disgust at such lifestyles as a peculiarity of the right. Indeed, the Guardian-reading left is perhaps more guilty of wanting to make moral judgements about lifestyle.

The problem for Ms Moore is that she likes the license of sexual liberation and the idea that no-one should have their talent dismissed simply because of their gender, sexual preferences, skin colour or accent. But she can't get her mind round the idea of economic freedom - the free enterprise and free trade bits of the great triumvirate of liberties.

As a Conservative, freedom is central to be world view. It is what we fought to secure, it is why we stand in silence every November to remember and it's why we get involved in politics. If freedom were secure - and secure for ever - then we could return to the plough and get on with the joy of life. But that freedom is threatened - by the sorts who would deny Ms Moore her words but also by those who would let others starve to protect their own income and position, by those who would create monopolies and by those who would castigate someone for the dreadful crime of creating jobs, wealth and success.

Suzanne Moore is right about freedom. But wrong to try and suggest - even to hint - that freedom can only be owned by the left.

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Free speech, free enterprise, free trade...

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...and while I’m about it free choice and free markets.

It hurts doesn’t it! I’ve been struck by the swiftness with which people have told me that, yes, believing in free speech, free enterprise and free trade are great but that this doesn’t mean supporting free markets. Because free markets are a bad thing.

Don’t you just love the division of freedoms? We launch enthusiastically into supporting freedoms where we like them but feel unable to back those freedoms where they don’t suit our prejudices. So here’s a little game with my three freedoms.

Supporting free speech means:

• Opposing the arresting of people for the ‘crime’ of causing offence - free speech means having the right to offend and to be offended.
• Believing that there is no institution, religion or organisation that is above criticism or immune from satire – free speech means having the right to criticise, to question and to condemn
• Rejecting the banning of advertising – marketing communication is speech and should be free, to suggest otherwise is to undermine free speech

Supporting free enterprise means:

• Believing that there are almost no circumstances where “more regulation” is either right or appropriate – free enterprise can only work where markets are free
• Rejecting the concept of ‘market failure’ – markets always and everywhere, when left to their own devices, succeed and failure is the result of intervention
• Opposing market fixing devices such as guilds, registrations, subsidies and regulations that restrict market entry – free enterprise requires a level playing field not a protected system

Supporting free trade means:

• Rejecting managed markets – and this includes so-called “fair trade” – since they prevent free exchange and free enterprise
• Opposing protectionism in all its forms whether regulatory or financial – tariffs, duties, anti-dumping rules, quotas and environmental or employment regulation
• Supporting the liberalising of international markets in finance, government services and insurance – without free trade in these areas, other trading arrangements are compromised

This is the deal with freedom – it doesn’t come in tidy little units where we can have a little free speech but not have free trade. If you want it you have to want it all. So when people try to tell me that they want a free press but not a free market in news (because of the big bad Murdoch) then they are, in truth rejecting that free speech. When people say they want free enterprise but that free markets must be controlled, I know that they don’t support free enterprise. And when people tell me they support fair trade (and suggest that this is somehow ‘ethical’), they are no friend of freedom.

All these freedoms interlock – dividing them doesn’t work and diluting one freedom compromises another. It’s hard to have free enterprise without free speech, free trade requires free enterprise and the ability to choose, interact and exchange is central to any society laying claim to being free.

Those three things – free speech, free enterprise and free trade – are the things that matter. And we know they’re working when we have free markets, free assembly and free choice.

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On being right-wing....

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It has been a funny experience watching and listening to all that American politics playing itself out on our media. And the thing that makes me scratch my head most is the automatic connection made between being “right-wing” and a set of ossified social opinions. Sometimes this is called “The Christian Right” or “Social Conservatism” and always is it characterised by opponents as “bigotry” or – by the more mild-mannered – “out-of-touch”.

Now I’m right-wing. At least if you define being right-wing as wanting a small government, as believing in self-reliance, personal responsibility and looking out for the neighbours. None of this is about god, gays or the production of babies. Yet these outlooks have become cemented into place as fixtures of being “right-wing” in America.

But I’m still right-wing. Not in some cuddly, metroliberal, noblesse oblige kind of way but red in tooth and claw, in-your-face right-wing. The sort that believes in that old Reagan dictum:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help ...”

If we want change – and boy do we need it – then we have to dump the social conservatism, the judgemental moralising and the ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ attitude to women. And with that baggage goes the tutting, curtain-twitching, lip-pursed, “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that” approach to the neighbours. The speed at which social attitudes to homosexuality have changed should be the starting point for our understanding of how being 'right-wing' must change.

None of this is about the 'nasty party' tag the left - and our current Home Secretary - lumbered us with. Nor is it about some process of centrist triangulation - a sort of Blue-rinsed Blairite approach. Indeed that approach and the "always tack to the centre" attitude of the terminally ambitious in both main parties has been responsible for the managerialist, Whitehall-knows-best policy platform that dominates current agendas. And created the mess we're in.

Thirty years ago I concluded that being right-wing meant being against the establishment's viewpoint and position. Even back in the early 1980s under a Conservative government, the establishment was viscerally anti-enterprise and especially disliked people who drove vans and the reps in their Ford Sierras. The "business" voice was provided by the smoothly-attired, public school leaders of the big businesses rather than by the bloke with a garage on the corner.

And even then - and this still applies - business voices played second fiddle to the sounds of people who weren't trade. You know the sorts - lawyers, doctors, the occasional bishop, folk from the BBC. To this smooth bunch were added, for entertainment I suspect, a few luvvies (only the posh ones with RP accents who went to RADA) and the occasional writer or journalist.

And, for these people, being right wing was the worst sin. I recall being introduced to a senior chap from the TUC by a good friend (who was both a priest and a Liberal) with words like this:

"Ah, this is Simon. He's the presentable sort of Tory."

Now I knew what my friend meant - I wasn't about to call for the blacks to be sent home or for women to be stopped from working. The sort of positions that the sophisticated establishment folk believed (and still believe) are held by most (definitely unpresentable) Conservatives. It was OK for me to be let out in establishment circles - I wouldn't scare them.

Believing in free choice, free speech, free enterprise and free trade seems to me the only moral political position - all others involve preventing someone from doing something because you think you know better. And that free choice, free speech, free enterprise and free trade stuff - that's right-wing. That's what it's about. It's not about god. It's not about gays. And it's definitely not about babies.

And so long as a few so-called "conservatives" think its about god or gays or women having babies and doing the washing up then the establishment - the left-wing corporate state - will have us by the balls. Being right-wing is about believing in freedom. That's it really and trying to build a coalition between people who really want to be free and people who want to take away or prevent others having freedom is never going to work.

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