I think we should initially recognise that trade does not exist in a vacuum. It is about relationships and trust, and which country is better to trust than Australia? In April, we have the Anzac Day commemoration in Whitehall, where we acknowledge and remember the hundreds of years of joint working and joint operations against tyranny and dictatorship. We have the long-standing and deep Five Eyes intelligence relationship, which also underpins our defence of our freedoms, and only this morning the Defence Committee was conducting an inquiry into the AUKUS agreement. We also have much wider relationships—family, political, trading, business, trade union, cultural and sporting—and of course a common basis in the common law.
Therefore, if we are going to do trade deals with anyone—and this is what has always surprised me about the opposition shown by some on the Opposition Benches—it should be a deal with Australia, as we have so much in common. That is why the contribution from the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), was so welcome today. It had a very different tone from some speeches we have heard previously, and it is all the more welcome for that.
We have to recognise—and I forget which colleague mentioned this—that there is always a dynamic between free trade and fair trade. It is a debate that has dominated British politics from time to time over the last 150 or so years, and it has even twice torn the Conservative party apart. It is right to have such a debate, and we therefore need to focus on the details and on the principles, because such agreements cannot be an open door to pillage. We also have to make sure that the other parties are living up to the commitments they make in these agreements. Probably the most telling example is the accession of China to the World Trade Organisation, in that the great failure of the WTO and partner countries has been the failure to hold China to the commitments it made in joining that organisation.
At the same time, unlike some on the right and left of politics who seem to be opposed to trade in and of itself, we should recognise the huge benefits that trade has brought throughout history. Otherwise, we would have to go back to the days before the industrial revolution, when not only did trade drive the growth of Britain as the world’s leading industrial power, but imports of food from the new world fed the new urban masses running such industries. We cannot ignore that.
Equally, while we should not dismiss some of the particular impacts of trade—with sometimes the movement of work and sometimes the exploitation of those opportunities—we should recognise the huge reduction in poverty worldwide post war through the growth in trade. That is especially so, frankly, in China, where hundreds of millions have moved out of poverty in what is probably the biggest move out of poverty in history. Our starting point should be to encourage the development of trade, but with caution. We should not have predatory trade, and certainly not trade based on a race to the bottom on standards.