Britain after Brexit: it’s time to decide on our place in the world

‘Global Britain’: a phrase that provokes mockery and even indignation. As an alternative to EU membership many consider it impossible and worse, undesirable. Are we capable of true independence, or is this an illusion? Does ‘global Britain’, as its bitterest critics accuse, draw on imperial nostalgia and nationalistic arrogance? Or is it a rational response to a changing world?

It is certainly not a new response. Britain has been a global player since the 1730s. Since the early 1800s we have had to be: with a population of 14 million we were no longer able to feed ourselves, and Britain’s enemies looked forward to the day when it would starve. Sir Robert Peel abolished the protectionist Corn Laws to import the cheapest food available: ‘We might on moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, but our lot is cast.’

Ever since, our goods trade has been precariously in balance and increasingly in deficit — now overwhelmingly with the artificially expensive EU and its Corn Law equivalent. Despite Sir Robert’s assumption, it was not King Cotton that fed us. Even during the fairly brief period when we were the workshop of the world we did not always sell sufficient manufactures to purchase our imports; and indeed, British industry has rarely, taking a long view, been a world beater. That title goes to global services and the City. We have long had to earn our bread by our wits.

Those who believe that we can only trade effectively with the nearest markets — the ‘gravity model’ by which the Treasury justified Project Fear — know little history. Our most dynamic economic partners for more than 200 years have been in the Americas. Our biggest single export throughout the 19th century was cloth to India. Advances in steamships and refrigeration transformed Victorian living standards by bringing wheat, beef, lamb and butter from the United States, Argentina, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.