What should Britain take from the world?

How will globalisation adapt to survive in the new normal? Indeed should it survive? Those giants of applied economics, Lord (Jim) O’Neill and George Magnus, had an entertaining and informative “to and fro” on the dodgy future of international trade, business and investment recently in TheArticle. If you haven’t looked at their contributions, you might enjoy a read. (This is Jim’s piece, and here is George’s reply.)

I have ploughed through Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, from cover to cover, albeit a long time ago. And an even longer time ago I read PPE at Oxford. But I would be a fool to believe that entitles me to join the experts’ economic debate. However I suspect they are unable to see the social and strategic wood for the economic trees.

Consider this: I have just finished my regular, 365 days a year, breakfast. Proper yoghurt from Serres in Greek Macedonia. Blueberries from Guatemala and strawberries from, I think, South Africa. A few slices of an apple from Chile. Topped of with a modest splash of maple syrup from Canada. No problem accessing these exotic ingredients throughout the year. Just pop into your local supermarket. Cost isn’t a problem either. It would be more involved and more expensive to fix a traditional, surprisingly classless, English fry up. (When I moved from my East End home to Oxford in 1958, and started eating breakfast in hall, I hardly noticed any difference.) Ain’t globalisation grand? Well, up to a point.

Apart from being delicious and relatively healthy, my breakfast is certainly the cheap and easy option. But it is also globalisation gone mad. Think of how grossly anti-social the choices are. The endless air miles involved in bringing me breakfast. The chaos caused by those fleets of giant lorries which deliver my essential supplies to the supermarket shelves. They cause air pollution, noise pollution, disrupt our often narrow roads and generally make life less pleasant for all of us. Our farmers and farm workers suffer because they can’t compete with cheap third world competition.

Yet with a little adjustment and a small increase in my food bill, I could source my breakfast from this country. Local yoghurt. English honey instead of maple syrup. Seasonal juggling of fruits and berries. (English apples store perfectly well for the lean winter months. And seasonal English strawberries taste so much better than their year round, cardboard tasting, global substitutes. They are surely worth waiting for.) Why don’t I change? Help our farmers and also do a modest bit towards fighting global warming? The truth is I can’t be bothered. And neither I suspect can you.

And so from the micro to the macro. Globalisation is about the free movement of goods and services, money… and people. Yet the globe is a rough old place these days. Islamist terrorism. Organised crime. Cyber attacks. Democracy on the retreat. Muscle flexing players with nuclear arsenals or nuclear ambitions — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others — are dangerous and unpredictable semi-totalitarian states. They wish us ill. Yet we import more than half of our food when we should surely be working towards greater national self-sufficiency. If that means bigger subsidies for farmers, so be it. Edward Heath gave away our territorial fishing rights to join the EU. We are having a heck of a problem getting them back from our friends across the Channel. What a surprise.

We were not even making protective medical equipment on any scale when the virus hit. “Manufacturing” was regarded as something done by developing nations. We relied on being able to import essential goods. Even in times of global crisis. We learned a nasty lesson recently as we were often shoved to the back of the queue, or sold faulty masks and gowns, or simply ripped off. We have also allowed foreign investors to move in on crucial infrastructure projects, often from countries like China where “commercial” companies are, when necessary, arms of the state. Do we really want the Communist Party of China deeply embedded in our next generation of telecommunications networks? Or our railways and ports? Do we really want to be a haven for Russian funny money?

I am heartily sick of the government and the Opposition shamelessly praising “our amazing NHS”. Of course, the staff — often immigrants, or guest workers here for a period — deserve our unstinted gratitude. They are indeed amazing. I owe my life to them, as does Boris. But the reason the NHS needs so many foreign workers; their labour, their skills and dedication, is because it has been appallingly underfunded, understaffed and inefficiently over-managed for years. It was easier and cheaper to recruit foreign labour, mainly from developing countries or the poorer nations of the EU. We should have been recruiting, training and paying our own citzens decently. Instead we poach health care workers from countries that need their skills even more than we do. Then we pay them peanuts and in the current crisis and failed even to provide them with adequate protective equipment for many weeks.

It took public anger and a back bench Tory revolt to force Boris to drop the insulting £400 a year surcharge imposed on foreign health service workers for using the NHS themselves — that’s right, the NHS which they are risking their lives to help keep afloat. Not only is this shameful mean spiritedness. It is also unsustainable, as the Prime Minister is learning the hard way.

I recognise the economic benefits of globalisation to “people like us”. I know that it has lifted many millions in the developing world out of abject poverty. I’m not a Little Englander. But our approach to globalisation has to change. It is not just about money. It is about national security, self sufficiency and social cohesion. It is about recognising our allies and those who wish us ill. It is about the strains on communities imposed by decades of uncoordinated mass immigration, particularly on the poorest parts of the country.

The coronavirus crisis and post-Brexit planning have fortuitously come together to emphasise the need for a new approach, and to provide the moment for change. Let us hope the Government will take it. But I will have to change my breakfast menu too.