India is the future, not Europe
Posted on August 8, 2010The size and seniority of the British Government delegation sent to India shows that Westminster is at last waking up to the thing that everyone else knows – India is the great economic hope for the 21st Century.
With a rapidly expanding economy, a vast population and a well-functioning, liberal democracy, it is essential that we tap into India’s growing wealth.
The focus on the Old World, so typified by the British political class’ obsession with European integration, is worse than irrelevant, it is becoming dangerous. By bricking ourselves up in a protectionist Fortress Europe, we send the insulting signal that we don’t want to buy Indian goods, and we don’t want them to buy our products.
It’s quite encouraging that the Coalition are making the right noises – with David Cameron calling for trade barriers to be dropped and even Vince Cable saying:
There is no future for Britain looking inward and backward, or being trapped in a Eurocentric world. Our country must be open for global business.
This is a welcome change in rhetoric, particularly to hear a Liberal Democrat acknowledge the foolishness of trying to be little-Europeaners when Europe is falling behind the rest of the world. But when will it be matched by a change in action?
Britain has given up control of her own trade policy. Even though David Cameron and Vince Cable, the PM and Business Secretary, recognise that our future must lie in free trade with India, the decision is out of their hands.
Instead of being able to simply go ahead and drop our trade barriers to India – bilaterally or even unilaterally – they have to sit on their hands and wait for the EU to strike a deal that allows the corrosive regime of protectionism and subsidies in all sorts of industries to continue.
We have waited through four years of moribund EU-India negotiations – how much longer must we wait to do what we could easily simply do tomorrow if we controlled our own trade policy?
The argument for “pooling” sovereignty in the EU is supposedly that it gives us more clout – and Vince Cable amongst others has peddled the myth that we would be ignored if we negotiated alone. But Britain, not the EU, is ideally placed to deal with India; we share so many cultural, liguistic and even legal ties with them that we should be natural partners.
Frankly, it is shameful that while we wait on negotiators who never have to answer to the people for the harm their delays do to our economic prospects, other, smaller and more nimble economies like Canada have already taken advantage of those same links to get their share of the Indian dream.
If we aren’t careful we will find ourselves in a stagnant economic backwater where instead of musing on the possibility of free trade with India, we will be begging them to sign on any terms.
David Cameron and Vince Cable are right – it is time for free trade with India, and the abandonment of the “eurocentric” obsession. But that is all talk unless they actually do something about it.
Tags: Britain, David Cameron, Economics, EU, Free Trade, India, Protectionism, Vince Cable
Categories: Economics, Politics
Mark ,
I agree with what you say about the EU and the trade barriers but Do you think that India is going to be more powerful than China ? Also what do you think of the World Trade Organisation roll ?
02.08.2010 08:58
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02.08.2010 09:10
Excellent article, though the elephant in the room here is indeed China. And the reason we absolutely must stand side by side with India.
India’s long tradition of democracy acts as a natural check to the negative externalities of capitalist expansion. Essentially, it means that that people are visible and, although things aren’t perfect, the poor are at least on the internal radar. With democratic oversight, capitalism can be the engine of social good. It produces value and distributes opportunity.
In China, the radar only faces outwards. Without the decadent indulgence of democratic tradition, China’s acceptance of capitalism has been awesome. They’ve embraced capitalism as if it were a tenant of communism (in reality in modern China, it actually is). As we know from history, when the communists did something, they did it big: weaponry, engineering, agriculture – it was always built on volume and fuelled with oppression. And that’s exactly what they’re doing now. Without democratic oversight, Chinese capitalism has developed a steroid habit.
If the Cold War could be easily cast as a Rocky IV style military-industrial struggle between oppressive Soviet muscle-mass and Free World entrepreneurialism, so too can the new economic age. Except this time, the muscle-bound monster from the East has worked out the secret to our success and is pounding away mercilessly.
Next to China, as they literally are, India’s impressive growth looks puny. In order to compete over the next decade and beyond, India needs free trade with us as much as we need it with them.
02.08.2010 10:31
‘Well-functioning’ democracy? What of the endemic corruption? There isn’t a public sector worker in India who isn’t on somebody other than the taxpayer’s payroll.
02.08.2010 21:26