XPost: soc.history, alt.history.british, soc.culture.british
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

Brexit, the Corn Laws and the Common Market: a brief history of
Britain’s trade deals

https://t.co/OqfrHvHUpk

They allow consumers to buy more, better-quality products at lower
prices, and as such are credited with driving economic growth and
encouraging innovation. It’s little wonder, then, that the future of Britain’s trade deals post-Brexit are dominating headlines worldwide.
Here, Professor Kevin O'Rourke charts the history of Britain’s trading agreements and explains why they have often proved divisive…

A cartoon from 'Punch' magazine (1903) titled 'Fidgety Joe', by Edward
Linley Sambourne, depicting two parents representing the Duke of
Devonshire and Arthur Balfour (centre), respective leaders of the
Liberal Unionist and Conservative parties, trying to control their
son, Joseph Chamberlain. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain began his famous
crusade for Imperial Preference – an issue which caused deep divisions
in the government and ultimately paved the way for the Liberal Party's
return to power in the 1906 general election. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
February 21, 2019 at 2:40 pm

On 2 July 2018, Theresa May was preparing for a crucial cabinet
meeting to be held four days later in Chequers. The United Kingdom had
finally been given the green light to start negotiating with the
European Union on the future trade relationship between the two
parties, but in order to do so it needed to decide what it wanted. And
this was proving difficult, given the huge gulf that existed between
Tory Europhiles and Eurosceptics. Broadly speaking, the former group
wanted a relationship between the UK and EU that was as close as
possible, involving no new barriers to trade or costly border
formalities. The latter wanted Britain to be free to make its own laws
and regulate its trade as it saw fit. Mrs May’s problem was to find a
common position behind which the two warring factions could unite.

Robert Peel’s Corn Laws

A backbench Conservative MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg warned Mrs May in a
newspaper article published that morning (2 July 2018) that unless she
held firm to her Lancaster House promise to leave the EU’s Single
Market and customs union, she would suffer the fate of Robert Peel in
1846. Peel had taken a decisive move towards free trade in that year
[1846] by abolishing the Corn Laws. This was surprising, since Peel
was a Conservative, and the Conservatives had traditionally been the
party of landowners. Allowing tariff-free imports of grain would,
everyone assumed, lower food prices and agricultural incomes. And so
the Conservative party split; the Liberals came to power; and the
Tories were largely excluded from government for a generation.

A portrait of British Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel
(1788-1850), c1845. The Victorian prime minister, who is best known
for repealing the Corn Laws in 1846, has been likened by the Tory MP
Jacob Rees-Mogg to the sitting prime minister, Theresa May. May risks “splitting the Conservative party like Sir Robert Peel" if she fails
to deliver a clean break from the European Union, Rees-Mogg has
warned. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1846 was a traumatic year for the party, and Rees-Mogg has not been
the only Conservative to invoke it at times of stress. In 1961 Harold Macmillan, who was trying to engineer the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), faced opposition from Tory backbenchers
worried that this would undermine Britain’s links with the
Commonwealth. In his diary he noted that things were “getting terribly
like 1846” [see The Macmillan Diaries, Vol II: Prime Minister and
After (1957–66) edited by Peter Catterall (Macmillan, 2011)].
Trade deal facts

The UK’s decision to leave the EU (by 29 March 2019, under Article
50) will fundamentally change its terms of trade with the 27 other
member states, and with the rest of the world

As a member of the European Union (EU), the UK is part of some 40
trade agreements which the union has with more than 70 countries. If
the UK leaves the EU in a ‘no-deal Brexit’ on 29 March, it will
immediately lose these deals

The government estimates that about 11% of UK’s trade relies on
the EU’s agreements with other countries

Trade policies are about economics, but they are also about a
country’s place in the world, and they have often proved divisive. By
the late 19th century the virtues of free trade had become an article
of faith for most British politicians, but some Conservatives remained sceptical. In 1881 the Fair Trade League was founded, advocating an
end to commercial treaties with other countries “unless terminable at
a year’s notice” so as to avoid “entanglements” that might limit the country’s freedom of action.

It also argued in favour of moderate tariffs on imports of foreign
food, and tariffs on manufactured goods coming from countries not
treating British exports “fairly”. The Conservative party was split on
the issue of fair trade in the 1885 general election: Sydney Henry
Zebel, a historian of the controversy, commented that: “Many found it
wiser to declare themselves free-traders and opposed to any reversal
of the fiscal legislation of 1846. Others attempted to gain fair-trade
support in the constituencies by a frank espousal of that cause. Still
others attempted to straddle the issue”.

Imperial Preference

The Conservative Party split again over trade after 1903, when Joseph Chamberlain began his famous crusade for Imperial Preference.
Chamberlain wanted to use trade policy to promote the political
integration of the Empire: he argued that the UK ought to have lower
tariffs on imperial than on foreign goods. Since British tariffs were
for the most part zero, it would be necessary, in George Dangerfield’s
words, to “build a tariff wall around England for the single purpose
of knocking holes in it, through which Imperial goods might pass” [see
The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1966 (first published in 1935)].

Gold medallion of Constantius I, from the mint of Trier. It depicts
Constantius celebrating his victory over Alectus in AD 296.
Constantius is shown on a horse at the gates of London, welcomed by
Britannia. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)

But this meant imposing tariffs on imports of foreign wheat and meat,
thus increasing food prices and lowering workers’ real wages. The
then-prime minister Arthur Balfour sought desperately to keep his
party together – in the words of Alan Sykes, a historian of the
period, Balfour was a great believer in “verbal formulas as a means of resolving genuine conflicts of belief”. And so he constructed tortuous
policy platforms involving inter alia tariffs that did not have
protection as their “primary object” – whatever that meant. The Conservatives were trounced by the Liberals in the 1906 general
election.

It fell to Chamberlain’s son Neville to implement the policy of the
father: no sooner had he been appointed chancellor of the exchequer,
in November 1931, that he set about introducing tariffs. And those
tariffs fell disproportionately on foreign goods (as opposed to goods
from the Empire/Commonwealth). As he said to the House of Commons on 4
February 1932, with his mother in the visitors’ gallery and his
half-brother Austen sitting on the Conservative benches:

There can have been few occasions in all our long political history
when to the son of a man who counted for something in his day and
generation has been vouchsafed the privilege of setting the seal on
the work which the father began but had perforce to leave unfinished.
Nearly 29 years have passed since Joseph Chamberlain entered upon his
great campaign in favour of Imperial Preference and Tariff Reform.
More than 17 years have gone by since he died… His work was not in
vain. I believe he would have found consolation for the bitterness of
his disappointment if he could have foreseen that these proposals,
which are the direct and legitimate descendants of his own conception,
would be laid before the House of Commons, which he loved, in the
presence of one and by the lips of the other of the two immediate
successors to his name and blood.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces the outbreak of the
Second World War in a BBC broadcast, 1939. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Imperial Preference remained a cornerstone of British economic policy
in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it reflected the very
real human, economic, political and strategic ties that still existed
between Britain and the Dominions and which had been crucial in
allowing Britain to emerge triumphant from two world wars. The
Commonwealth was the political expression of these ties, and it had
functioned effectively before 1945 despite its lack of a formal
rulebook.

It is understandable that many British politicians should have wished
to see these ties continuing into the future. But it is also
understandable that many also hoped to create closer links with
Europe. There was no apparent reason why Britain should have to choose
between these alternative sets of relationships, and alternative
identities: loose free trade arrangements and loose political
arrangements would allow Britain to enjoy free trade with the European continent while retaining Imperial Preference. Or so many hoped.

Night view of people jammed into Times Square, New York, celebrating
the end of the war in Europe. (Photo by Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
Customs union

But then, in the 1950s, the Europeans decided that they wanted not a
free trade area, but a customs union. Not only would goods exported
from one member state to another be exempt from tariffs; all member
states would have the same tariffs vis à vis third countries. This
would mean that there would be no need for checks at borders to ensure
that wine being shipped from Italy to France, say, was actually
Italian (and thus not subject to tariffs) rather than Argentinian –
since all Argentinian wine would be taxed at the same rate no matter
where it entered the EEC. And a common tariff policy would also
increase the new community’s bargaining power.

Newly-elected Conservative Party Leader of the Opposition, Margaret
Thatcher (1925 - 2013) lends her support to 'Keep Britain in Europe' campaigners in Parliament Square, London, on 4th June 1975, the day
before voting in the United Kingdom EEC referendum (or Common Market referendum). Thatcher is wearing a sweater featuring the flags of
European member states. Britain had joined the European Community two
years earlier and the following day, just over two-thirds of voters
backed continued British membership. (Photo by P. Floyd/Daily
Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It all made perfect sense from the European point of view, but the
decision placed British politicians in a painful dilemma. If they
stayed aloof from the Common Market they would face discrimination in Europe’s biggest markets. But if they joined it, they would by
definition have to abandon Imperial Preference. Which is one reason
why Britain did not join the EEC from the outset, and why Harold
Macmillan found himself worrying, in the spring of 1961, that it was
all “getting terribly like 1846”.

Britain’s 19th-century past thus mattered a lot during the critical
years when European integration took a decisive step forward. And the
fact that Britain initially remained aloof meant that it eventually
joined a Common Market that had been shaped by other countries in a
way that reflected their own histories. Not only did it make sense for
them to form a customs union rather than a mere free-trade area, it
also made sense for them to complement that customs union with a range
of policies that protected farmers and helped to ensure that the EEC
would have a social and a political, as well as an economic,
dimension.

Londoners read newspaper headlines about Britain's entry to the Common
Market, January 1973. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

For while it was important to obtain the economic benefits of
continent-wide free trade, it was equally important to ensure that
economic competition did not lead to regulatory ‘races to the bottom’:
the aim was to create institutions that would accommodate not only
markets, but the welfare state; mixed economies; and regulations that
were felt to be necessary in order to protect workers and consumers,
and avoid a repeat of the disastrous 1930s.

This basic function of European integration may sometimes have been
honoured as much in the breach as the observance, but it continues to
shape European attitudes and ‘red lines’ today. For example, it would
be inconceivable for the European Union to allow a country on its very
borders, as large as the UK, to freely access European markets without
there being constraints on its ability to deregulate its economy.

It is the interaction between these distinct British and European
histories, not to mention the history of Ireland, which produced not
only Brexit, but the negotiations that followed the 2016 referendum. A
history of Tory party division not only gave rise to the ill-fated
(and Balfour-esque) Chequers plan that Mrs May concocted last summer,
but the referendum itself: as David Cameron told the leader of the
Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg in 2012, it was “a party management
issue”.

History cannot tell us how this story will end. But history is
essential if we are to understand how we got to where we are today,
and it will also help us to make sense of whatever it is that will
happen tomorrow.
-----
Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke is Chichele Professor of economic history at
All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of A Short
History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop (Penguin, 2019).

Source: https://t.co/OqfrHvHUpk

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