The 'Commercial gents' have lost their importance

Readers of Patrick O'Brian will be familiar with the author's benign contempt in the Aubrey / Maturin novels for the 'commercial gents'; rich city merchants, florid and grandiloquent, who wear patriotism like a cloak but whose only real interest is their own wealth. They are never entirely above suspicion of being willing to trade or deal with the King's enemies, of putting profit above patria, and O'Brian paints them unsympathetically. Yet trade and commerce are indeed the nation's 'life blood' - and today only the extraordinary success of British business has placed the UK fifth in the world's GDP league. 

But not all trade and commerce is good trade and commerce. Not all of it benefits the country and its people more than it benefits its owners - and that's the test. Why should UK trade policy be developed for the benefit of global shareholders whose activities have frequently disadvantaged both the country and its people? This issue has become much clearer in the minds of the electorate during the three years of Remain sabotage of the Brexit vote, with the CBI now dismissed as no more than a creature of the global corporates, and the car makers rightly identified as global hippies with no anchor to any nation, who will screw EU and government subsidies to put their car plants anywhere that pays their global shareholders maximum profit. Let's take a look at them -

Here you have the true importance of car making in the UK - it's almost exactly the same size as Romania's car industry, and substantially smaller than Poland's. And if you expanded the graphic to the whole world, we're exactly nowhere. The effects of globalism mean that the 'commercial gents' have lost some of their importance - and in this election, and in any future trade talks, their voices may be the loudest but that doesn't mean we should pay them the greatest heed.

Take fish and British waters. Farage talks a load of bollocks about this - as the Speccie explains -

Farage’s current predicament is rooted in a disastrous strategic decision he and an inner-circle of yes men took on the day Boris Johnson unveiled his new Withdrawal Agreement. Within minutes (possibly before the document had even been published) they decided to rubbish Boris’s deal as “not Brexit”. Farage bet the farm on being able to win that argument in the country. His aim was that the Brexit party would then take permanent possession of the huge Leave electorate, much of which had coalesced around it at the European elections.

Soon the Brexit party resorted to depicting things that applied only in the transitional period as if they would be permanent. There were claims Britain would be locked forever in economic alignment with the EU, unable to pursue an independent foreign policy or be in charge of what happened in UK fishing waters. It was even said the new Northern Ireland-only features could spell the end of the Union.

This position led inexorably to the logic that the Brexit party, as the only true Brexit option, must stand in every British mainland constituency at the general election. All other options – from standing aside altogether with a warning to Johnson that the Brexit party would be on his back during the next phase of future relationship negotiations, to fighting only a limited number of safe Labour seats in abandoned former industrial and coastal towns – were dismissed. But despite stirring up some of his Twitter followers against the Boris deal, Farage lost the argument among Leavers as a whole.

But Nigel's disastrous and mistaken strategy for BrexitCorp™ doesn't mean that fishing and our waters aren't important - but how important?

France is already making clear that it will block any trade deal unless the EU continues to have a right of access to UK waters. That's how important it is. On our own side the commercial gents from the City keep telling us that fishing represents a piffling little piece of the British economy, that financial passporting and the access of the City's merchants to European markets are far more important, and if it comes to push versus shove we should sacrifice our fish and waters for the good of the City of London.

Boris today moves the final days of his campaign to the Leave towns of the North. Voters here aren't dumb, and if they vote BXP it won't be because they've swallowed Nigel's distortions. It will be because they don't trust Boris not to give away the UK's fishing waters during a post-Brexit trade deal for the good of the commercial gents. And that, Prime Minister, is your key challenge in the North - to make it clear that British waters aren't up for negotiation.