Editor’s note: “Remainer” is taken to mean a person who voted for the UK to remain in the European Union (UK) in the 2016 referendum. This article first appeared in UK’s Express news portal under headline “Remainers are Terrified of Change, They Prefer to see Britain Decline”.
THE European Union’s (EU) gross domestic product (GDP) has halved since 1980 to become less than 15% as a proportion of the 2023 world economy. And EU GDP is set for another spectacular fall to nine percent of the global economic activity pie by 2050, according to PwC, one of the big four global professional services firms.
The plan, as formulated by the European Council in 2001 at Laeken, a suburb of Brussels, was to turn the EU into the world’s pre-eminent economic superpower.
The Laeken Declarations stated that the European Union would become “the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, with full employment and increased levels of social cohesion”.
A quarter of a century later, on these stated aims and looking at recent upheavals in France, Germany and the Netherlands for instance, most objective observers would conclude the EU to have been a failure.
The EU economy, and therefore the institution’s global relevance, is shrinking fast. Hence, the formal exit of the UK from the EU should have been seen by all as a timely escape from this bureaucratic shipwreck.
For a little while, those with thin hides and brittle nerves saw Britain floating on an unsteady life-raft as Britons watched the Titanic-like regulatory juggernaut heading for the rocks of international commercial competition.
During that time, the braver sorts who believed in Britain’s ability to compete and trade across the globe on its own terms and according to its own needs, lived with the constant wailing of those who wanted to remain within the EU at any price.
UK joins CPTPP
When it was reported at end-March 2023 that the UK had joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the wailing should have stopped. The doom-mongers should have taken note.
After all, Britain was, evidently, not isolated. The country just saw other and better options and took them – as is the wont of sovereign countries all over the world.
Indeed, the new free trade agreement (FTA) joins Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam with China waiting in the wings.
Today, it is an economic block of 12 sovereign nation states with a total economy equal in size to that of the European Union 27 – let that sink in.
In addition, the countries within the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement will represent around a quarter of the global economy by 2050 from just 13% today.
In short, these 12 countries will grow to be 277% larger than the 27 nations making up the EU in a few decades time.
Further, the FTA will focus on trade only. There will be no political interference, no forced standardisation, no directives or rules applied by the back door, lubricated by special interests and lobby groups, against the wishes of the national demos.
The whole agreement is based on the time-honoured concept of mutual recognition: each country can export to another, tariff free, so long as the goods and products meet the regulatory requirements of the importer as well as the taste of the local populations.
In other words, this is what most people across the UK always assumed trading arrangements were about.
Never did they expect a trading block to aggregate power to itself to become the central source of political supremacy – over-ruling – in the UK, our parliament on the most important questions.
Unnecessary environmental concerns
However, the news was not received with the clamour such a deal should have generated. Much of the press wrote the FTA down.
For instance, Gina Miller, the “high priestess of remain” as Jacob Rees Mogg MP referred to her as they met to discuss the FTA on television, called the FTA “anti-consumer” and “anti-protection” – not quite realising that both concepts were mutually exclusive.
Protectionism raises prices; Consumers seek lower prices.
Realising her predicament and clutching at straws, she threw in the “environment” as a topic of discussion.
This she did seemingly in the hope that enough viewers would be dissuaded from backing the FTA.
Her main problem with this line of argument however is that environmental standards across countries such as Japan, Canada, Australia and many others within the CPTPP are as good if not better than most within the EU which consists of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Germany.
Her insistence on talking down the environmental standards of other nations within the CPTPP is repeated across much of the anti-Brexit media and a reason why countries such as Malaysia and her palm oil production have been penalised over the years.
Malaysia is one of the largest producers of palm oil and a signatory to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil as well as its own MSPO certification system to ensure to promote sustainable palm oil production.
CPTPP exempts protectionism
Tariffs of 12% have hitherto been imposed on her produce to protect the interests of French rape-seed oil growers among others – all in the name of the environment. Yet, oil yields for palm per hectare is almost six to10 times that of other oilseeds such as rapeseed.
The importation of palm oil, tariff free, will lead to lower prices to consumers – a welcome outcome at a time of heightened inflation.
The palm oil which is harvested from oil palm trees is used in a huge range of food and household products and has been at the rough end of years of pro-EU protectionist lobbying.
The commonwealth country and her produce have been shamelessly attacked by pressure groups on a slew of topics such as “deforestation, communities and wildlife”.
More than 90% of the palm oil imported into the continent of Europe (including the UK) is certified sustainable and does not cause deforestation. Indeed, according to Global Forest Watch, primary forest loss in Malaysia decreased by almost 70% between 2014 and 2020 and is the fourth straight year that palm oil deforestation has been trending down.
But more importantly, palm oil has been a key contributor to reducing poverty in Malaysia from 50% in the 1960s to just 5% today with smallholder production accounting for 40%t of total palm oil plantation areas.
But to our Remainer friends, the CPTPP is essentially an act of “turning back the clock” because it re-asserts sovereign control over trade and defangs supranational institutions – and to them, there is no greater sin.
The progressives, who have designed the EU into a bureaucratic and regulatory superpower are, it turns out, the world’s biggest reactionaries.
They sell “change” when it is on their terms but when actual change comes, they fight tooth and nail to keep their privileges, protect their incomes and pull-up the drawbridges when the reality of global competition comes knocking. – April 18, 2023
