Trump's claim that he wants to leave the WTO removes our last fig leaf of protection for a no-deal Brexit

Theresa May’s most amazing statement about no-deal Brexit, made in South Africa on a pointless trip, is that we shouldn’t worry, “it’s not the end of the world”.

This in the week when her government announced that, under no deal, food shortages would happen, planes would not fly, and medical supplies would have to be organised to meet emergency needs for a six week period.

But even if these immediate crisis issues are dealt with, how is Britain’s trade, most of which currently depends upon the EU’s customs and tariffs regime, going to survive undamaged if there is no trade deal with the EU?

The government’s answer comprises three words: World Trade Organisation. The Geneva-based international trade agency – its ‘rules’ and its trade dispute mechanisms – will, we are assured, secure our trade. Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg go further and say that it is actually preferable to be dependent upon the WTO, and that this is how the majority of countries outside the EU manage their trade relations without excessive tariffs or customs bureaucracy.

Except that this isn’t true. Not one single country in the world is dependent for their trade wholly on WTO guidelines – they aren’t ‘rules,’ because the sanctions for breaching the guidelines are puny. Every other country also has trade agreements covering much of their trade, typically with neighbouring countries to minimise tariff and customs barriers with their largest trading partners.

The US is a prime case in point. For all his anti-trade rhetoric, Trump is not proposing to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with neighbours Canada and Mexico. On the contrary, he is seeking to renegotiate it to make it more favourable to the US. For the UK, our neighbours are Ireland, France, the Netherlands and other European countries near to us – virtually all of which are within the European customs union and single market which May is proposing to leave.

Today’s announcement by Trump that the WTO itself is the “single worst trade deal ever made”, and that he might seek to withdraw from it, removes the last fig leaf of protection for May’s no-deal option – because it gives the lie to the notion that the WTO can be relied upon even for non-EU trade.

It is important to understand that the WTO, like the United Nations, is a weak international agency which depends upon financing and support from its largest members. These are the US and China, both of which are now seeking to subvert the liberal international trading system which, under previous more enlightened leaders, they had sought, painfully and partially, to establish.

This is already bringing the WTO to its knees. There is now flagrant flouting of WTO guidelines and disregard of WTO trade dispute decisions by the US and China. Trump’s decision not to appoint new trade dispute judges is putting the WTO in imminent danger of not even having the judges necessary to perform its key dispute resolution role.

It is possible that the WTO will soon completely collapse. Even if it survives, it will be weak and toothless in a dog-eat-dog world of Trump, Putin and Xi.

Britain currently belongs to the strongest multilateral trade organisation in the world, the European Union. We shouldn’t leave the EU until we have trade protection at least as good. It is increasingly clear that this is simply unachievable – which is why, long before the end of the world, we should hold a people’s vote to stay in the EU.

Andrew Adonis is a Labour peer