The problem with Liz Truss’s plan for an ethical post-Brexit trade policy

As international trade secretary, Liz Truss has one of the toughest jobs in politics – trying to make some kind of sense, let alone success, of the grand-sounding but nebulous concept of “Global Britain”: making Brexit a success, in other words.

To her credit, she is trying. Pre-empting the end of the Trump era, she has used a keynote speech at Chatham House to indicate that Global Britain will promote a rules-based international trading system, rather than, presumably helping to isolate and break the World Trade Organisation, as the US administration has tried. From the Department for International Trade there will be no mini-me echo of Donald Trump, no “Britain First” approach to new trading arrangements. Truss recalls the era of Cobden and Bright, the enlightenment values of Macaulay and the timeless principles of free trade in contrast to the protectionist populists of the US and, implicitly, within the ranks of her own party. 

Give or take a few wedges of Stilton, the recent trade deals with Japan and Cote d’Ivoire apparently stand testament to this new spirit of economic liberalism. She didn’t mention Michel Barnier by name, but she did refer to the EU’s “innovation-phobic” mindset and high tariff wall (and one that British farmers and others have sheltered behind for half a century).  

More than that, indeed, Truss has gone a bit ethical. She wants a “values-driven approach”. “The UK is setting out its path, in which we will neither sacrifice our values – freedom, democracy, human rights and the environment – nor our economic opportunity,” she says.

This might be termed the “Truss Doctrine”, though it is more colloquially familiar as “having your cake and eating it”. For a country the size of the UK to venture out into the cold, fiercely competitive business of global exporting in the age of economic nationalism, Covid and recession is a tough enough assignment; trying to throw its weight around on ethical standards might just make winning those export orders that much more tricky.  Inconvenient demands will probably lose orders. Yet any self-denying rules about dealing with nasty regimes fall down when so many other rivals are happy to fill the gap. As the late Alan Clark – once a Conservative trade minister in the 1980s – often observed, if the British won’t sell them arms then the French will.  

It is certainly a departure in trade policy, and not just because the UK is leaving the EU. Not since Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, briefly committed New Labour to an “ethical dimension” in foreign policy in 1997 has it been attempted (and it ended in resignation and tears). Historically, “values” have been alien to British foreign and mercantile policies, not least because the British were sometimes the least principled players of all, more than content to pioneer the slave trade,  or force opium on the Chinese. 

On arms, for example, British governments of both parties have been tangled up in ethical complications, but have rarely put ethics and values first. Labour governments, it’s hard to believe now, were once prepared to provide military gear to apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile.

Today, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are equally problematic, as is the defence/trade relationship with Israel and others. Truss has not announced a fresh embargo on any of those, nor does she suggest any other specific qualms about borderline democratic/authoritarian regimes, such as Narendra Modi’s India or Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, as she strives for “economically valuable and values-driven deals with India, the Gulf and our Latin American friends across the Mercosur bloc”. If they want our Wensleydale, Donkey Kong or fighter jets they can have them, presumably. If human rights and democracy are absolute criteria for exporting, there are few countries Britain will be able to sell to.  

In terms of imports, Truss stresses that the NHS is off limits, while chlorinated chicken and other horrors are banned, but “we cannot have blanket bans on any food produced differently from the UK”. If “produced differently” means “more efficiently in a democracy”, such as wheat from Canada or lamb from New Zealand, then the outlook for British agriculture and horticulture is bleak.  

Truss hardly mentioned China, except implicitly to criticise it for playing fast and loose with WTO rules, yet it remains a huge potential market. It does, however, fail most of the Truss Tests on values, and of course the UK is pushing Huawei and others back, not least because of Chinese actions in Hong Kong and its crimes against the Muslim Uighur people. The UK probably won’t make much trade progress there, but nor will it with Brazil, America and Australia if it insists on environmental protections and certain farming standards, nor with the Gulf or India on human rights and nor with many other countries with the wrong kinds of governments. Adding an ethical “values” dimension makes things very difficult. If only there was a large, prosperous, trading bloc of mostly progressive democracies with shared values sat on Britain’s very doorstep, complete with a well-regulated internal market and friction-free trade in goods and services that Truss could turn to...