Andrew Tettenborn

Britain’s Gulf trade deal is not the place for virtue signalling

Keir Starmer with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Credit: Getty images)

Rachel Reeves announced that a trade deal with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – in other words, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – was imminent last week. It was then leaked that, even though the deal was with unashamed petrostates with no time for net zero and, in some cases, a distinctly doubtful record on rights, the text imposed no legal duties in respect of human rights, modern slavery or the environment.

The trade unions and human rights groups are unhappy. The TUC wants any deal to be conditional on workers’ rights protection; the Trade Justice Movement and other earnest humanitarian activists are demanding binding commitments on human rights and pollution. So far, the government has stood its ground. In the Lords, Baroness Jones said bluntly that whatever our concerns might be about the GCC states’ record on liberty, human rights or the environment, trade talks were not the right place to raise them.

Trade deals should take account of our national interests and not much else

We must give credit where credit is due. Despite the fact that Labour in opposition frequently trumpeted the idea that trade deals needed to reflect political ideals, Baroness Jones is absolutely correct.

For one thing, the progressives’ moral arguments against the deal may sound good when you first read them. But on a closer look, they turn out to be highly dodgy. True, it’s pretty clear that some of the GCC states do indeed brutalise their people, their atmosphere or both in ways we don’t like. But it’s not as if our government is encouraging or supporting this. On the contrary, it makes it quite clear that it doesn’t.

What the activists are actually arguing is that Starmer’s government is under an imperative moral duty, because of what some GCC governments do, to impoverish the people of the Gulf states (who may not even support the regimes they live under) by increasing the price they pay for goods and services. They also want the Prime Minister, in effect, to imperil productive jobs in the UK and elsewhere, and to decline to ease burdens on companies here and in the Middle East, for the same reason. Many people will find such arguments not so much morally upright as priggish and ethically incoherent.

Nor, for that matter, are they likely to be very effective. Anyone who believes that a country gains admiration or influence by lecturing another about its internal practices should think again. We only have to look at the reaction in this country to the clumsy attempts by the US administration of Donald Trump to strong-arm us into changes in our laws about speech: however much you may like free speech, our feeling is rightly that this is our business and not Uncle Sam’s.

Or, indeed, imagine that the GCC was foolish enough to insist that, as a condition of signing any deal, this country should take steps to suppress what they see as Islamophobia. This would clearly kill the deal stone dead, and rightly so. It is a racing certainty that not only the governments but also the people of the Gulf states would think exactly the same about any attempt by the UK government to tell them how to run their internal affairs.

Suppose, too, we did say to the GCC that because of our commitment to an ethical foreign policy we would not sign a trade deal unless it contained binding provisions on workers’ rights, the environment and other matters. What would happen?

Whatever fond ideas the TUC or other political pressure groups may have about the influence of Britain as a force for good (or their idea of good) in the world, it’s difficult to see that it would have any effect whatsoever. The idea that, say, Saudi Arabia or Qatar would change their internal policies for the sake of preserving free trade with an economically second-eleven country like the UK is for the birds. They would simply shrug their shoulders and walk away, to the benefit of neither side.

Ironically, the beneficiary in such a case would very likely be the EU, which is also said to be closing on a deal with the GCC. Do we really want a situation where, because of a desire to virtue signal, we concede to EU companies more privileged access to Middle Eastern markets than UK ones?

Put simply, trade deals should take account of our national interests and not much else. The fact that such countries as China and Russia, for example, are no friends to us should make us think twice about making any arrangement with them. (Indeed, there is one feature of the national interest that might give us pause for thought about the Gulf deal: namely, that apparently the government has conceded the possibility of foreign governments holding up to 15 per cent shares in our newspapers.)

Labour, however, is right to take the view that, exceptional cases aside, governments should hard-headedly separate morality from trade. They may not be loved if they do – but they will certainly be better understood and respected. And that, in the long run, is what matters.

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