Full marks to Blair

Over the past fortnight it has been necessary for this magazine to side with those who would like to bury Tony Blair. This week it is our solemn duty to praise him. No amount of disquiet over his illiberal — and happily failed — scheme to subject terror suspects to 90 days’ detention without charge will stop us from recognising that the Prime Minister’s foreign- policy speech at Guildhall on Monday was an impressive piece of statesmanship.

In a month’s time members of the World Trade Organisation will gather in Hong Kong to continue the so-called ‘Doha round’ of negotiations over the liberalisation of world trade. The leaders of developed nations have a choice: either they elect to dismantle the system of agricultural subsidies and food import tariffs which have supported their farmers since 1945, thereby allowing developing nations to compete on equal terms in our food markets. Or Western leaders concoct some kind of sickly fudge, which allows them all to enjoy a good lunch, beam at the cameras, then go home and reassure their farming lobbies that nothing will really change.

With no prevarication, Mr Blair on Monday reaffirmed that he will be doing his utmost to take the former course. ‘Do we make trade work for all of us, or do we continue with a system with two billion people locked out of prosperity and denied a chance to work their way out of poverty?’ he said, reminding his fellow Western leaders that agriculture accounts for just 2 per cent of their collective GDP and that any harm caused to individual farmers will be vastly outweighed by the opportunities afforded to other sectors of the economy through a general freeing-up of trade. He might have added that the experience of the one developed nation so far to dismantle agricultural subsidies and trade barriers — New Zealand — is that free trade is far from harmful to agriculture.