The First Brexit-Era Trade Deal: Hold the Champagne

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Reports from London that the United Kingdom has secured a bilateral trade deal with Canada ought to bolster Brexiteer morale. Despite all of the setbacks of the last year toward finalizing an agreement with the European Union, surely this is a step in the right direction?

Don’t pop your champagne corks just yet, though. At least not until we see what kind of deal has Boris Johnson inked.

On the face of it, the news is encouraging. The British government expects to secure $20 billion in bilateral trade and enjoy $56 million reduction on tariffs for British exports entering the “Northern Dominion.” British autos, sold in Canada to the tune of $1 billion in sales last year, will now enter tariff free. In addition, UK producers will benefit from zero tariffs on many agri-food and seafood products, such as fish, beef, chocolate, confectionary, fruit and vegetables, bread, and pastries — exports that last year alone were worth $462 million to British industry.

Meanwhile, Canadian goods such as maple syrup, biscuits, and salmon, no longer subject to the UK Global Tariff, can expect an 8% drop.

“This is a fantastic agreement for Britain which secures transatlantic trade with one of our closest allies,” Prime Minister Johnson enthused, adding that early next year “we have agreed to start work on a new, bespoke trade deal with Canada that will go even further in meeting the needs of our economy.”

In these final sentiments, Premier Johson sows seeds of suspicion. For according to Breitbart London, these “future negotiations are also expected to focus on the ‘Build Back Better’ priorities of Mr. Johnson and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau” — ominously, on issues like the environment.

“Build Back Better” — such is the new zeitgeist marching across the West. The Conservative government of Britain adopts as its own the motto that was popularized as the mantra of Joe Biden’s campaign to become America’s president. So, it seems, do most other “progressive” countries.

Yet the innocuous “build back better” is cover for the even more inscrutable “Great Reset,” of which the driving force is the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. WEF is the sponsor of the Davos Forum held in the spring at Switzerland. Cynics describe the parley as billionaires lecturing millionaires on how ordinary people live. Or ought to.

Mr. Schwab, and his “Fourth Industrial Revolution” project, leave no room for doubt about their plans for the plebs. “Welcome to 2030,” reads the tab précis for one of its think pieces. “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

Sensible people everywhere, not just conservatives, are starting to be alarmed. The sort of seismic shift in society that threatened Britain and the Continent during the French Revolution again rears its head. We would be wise to heed the counsel of Edmund Burke: “There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.”

Those promoting the “Great Reset,” aided and abetted by collaborators in the press, abandon obfuscation and openly avow their intent for bureaucratic supremacy over society. “It would be madness not to give the fullest credit to the most deceitful of men,” Burke warned, “when they make declarations of hostility against us.”

The prospect before Great Britain beggars the belief expressed by Margaret Thatcher in her Bruges Speech. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain,” she insisted, “only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state.” What might she say in respect of the phantasm of a dominance that is global. Such dreams fascinate countless world leaders and their mandarins.

Mr. Johnson may take slight comfort that we do not indict him among those of evil intent. Is he even sensible of the perilous path along which he leads the UK? Either way, Brexit would be better served were a premier unsullied by the WEF agenda to assume the leadership of the Conservative government. The question is whether such a principled individual remains within the Tory party with the courage to rescue the United Kingdom before it is too late.

________

Mr. MacLean writes The New York Sun’s Brexit Diary


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