Our biggest trading partner?

 I wonder when and how much more it is going to take for those currently in charge of our trade relations to realise that we have made a major error in allowing China to be our "biggest trading partner". Yes, it is a huge "market". Yes, there might be "opportunities" there. 

This does not mean that these things are what is best for us. I have said elsewhere that our relationship with China has been built on laziness, on what is easiest for us. We have also allowed China to bully us into doing things their way.

There has been a recent spat between our current Foreign Minister and a former Prime Minister (of the same political persuasion). I have met both of them...and like neither of them. The FM and I clashed over an issue when I wrote to one of her colleagues suggesting that another approach might be more "diplomatic". She disagreed. The two of them ended up doing something else altogether and I had some feedback suggesting that this was because I, and a number of other people, had "interfered". Too bad. Had they gone ahead wiser heads than mine would still have been sorting out the subsequent earthquake.

The former PM is the man who flatly refused to employ me in the role everyone who knew me at the time expected me to get. Nothing could be done about it. He once strode ahead of me and slammed a door in my face - deliberately. I neither like nor trust him.

But both of them seem to think that we should be Asia-centric above all else. We also get told that by almost every other politician - even when they privately believe something else. Our current FM might well be "mending" the relationship she and her party like to claim was harmed by the previous government questioning the origins of Covid19. 

It is certainly a politically tempting move to suggest that the problems all lie with a previous PM of a different persuasion but it is actually much more complex than that. The real problems were caused by the more favourable deals that government had managed to negotiate with individual businesses in China. They made the mistake of thinking Chinese officialdom was going to allow that.  They forgot that Chinese business is done according to Chinese rules. They do not negotiate. They tell us how business will be done. If we do not like that then they have power to go elsewhere and make sure we do not get business elsewhere as well. 

We need to work on that. It is going to take very, very hard work to restore our trading ties with the rest of the world. It is going to take a great deal of diplomatic skill to do it. The problem is right now nobody seems to even recognise and acknowledge that  let alone do anything about it. 

The former PM needs to stay silent. The current FM needs to stop pretending the problem can be solved under her watch without a major change in the way we do business with the rest of the world. If that does not happen then the generation after next are going to be doing as China says. It won't be pleasant.