Reflections: Brexit - May just plays for time

While India and Britain wrangle over post-Brexit visas, and Indians seethe with resentment at the favouritism shown to China, Theresa May is playing for time over quitting the European Union. Her speech on Friday amid the Romanesque-Gothic magnificence of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella in Florence promised Britain would pay up to £40 billion into EU budgets and abide by European Court rulings in return for a transition deal that will guarantee many EU membership benefits until 2021. I am not sure whether she was preparing the ground for this weekend’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester, hoping to silence her rebellious and rumbustious foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, or attempting some ambidextrous wizardry to convince both Remainers and Leavers that nothing could be closer to her heart than their particular — and opposing — interests. At the same time, the lavish invocation of Britain’s ties with Europe with which she began her speech seemed designed to flatter the European Commission’s gaunt president, Jean-Claude Juncker, that Brexit never happened.

Actually, she is cocking a snook at those jeremiahs who take pleasure in gloating that Britain will come to regret the Brexit vote. Soaring above her island moorings, Britain has outgrown those 27 EU countries bound in red tape and scolded and hectored by an obscure politician from the tiny grand duchy of Luxemburg who has never even set foot in England. Ms May has it on the authority of Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, that her destiny as Prime Minister is to build a “Global Britain”. Knowledgeable imperialists might retort with the old boast that the sun never set on the British empire (never mind the crack that God didn’t trust it in the dark) but Mr Li is a newcomer to history, other perhaps than of his own country. Reminding China Daily readers that Charles Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, he adds: “At this turning point for Britain, these words ring true.”  He means it’s the best of times because in leaving Europe, Britain can embrace China. The Huawei dongle I bought in Kensington the other day with its 3 SIM makes it difficult to disagree. 

Mr Li is strongly supported by Lord Davidson, a Labour life peer and Scotland’s advocate-general under Tony Blair, who is one of the very few Westerners in public life to defend China’s record in Tibet. He has called on Liam Fox, Britain’s international trade secretary, to recognise the “enormous” opportunities for trade with China. There’s no time to be lost. A Britain-China free trade agreement must “come into force the day after Brexit”, he warns.  The ambassador is naturally even more pressing, some would say presumptuous. Declaring that “Chinese investment in the UK is an opportunity, not a threat”, he observed that China is bringing prosperity and stability to the British by investing $18 billion in a wide range of sectors from infrastructure and equipment manufacturing to hi-tech, new energy and financial services to create jobs and generate green, low carbon growth.

He mentions the Hinkley Point project, which is partly financed by a Chinese company and is expected to create 26,000 jobs while also reducing nine million tons of carbon emission annually. “The £250-million auto plant in Coventry built by China’s Geely Group will roll out a new generation of zero-emission cabs onto the streets of London by 2018”. China’s ABP Royal Albert Dock project is also investing £1.7 billion in an urban complex of offices, homes and shops to create a third business and financial district in east London. Increasing investment by other major Chinese  undertakings like Huawei and Wanda amount to a vote of confidence in Britain’s future. Of course Ms May is anxious to show she has one or two other arrows in her quiver. She has courted Japan. She has visited India. A report, “Brexit: Opportunities for India”, by the 52-member Commonwealth claims that Brexit will present a significant “opportunity” to India, which has been negotiating an FTA with the EU for a decade, “to strengthen its economic relationship with the UK through an India–UK trade and investment agreement”.

Britain can be more flexible, it says, than the EU on rules regarding intellectual property and data protection. Rashmi Banga, the report’s author, is quoted as saying that Britain and India can secure a far-reaching deal which will increase the value of British exports to India by 33 per cent from £4.2 billion to £6.3 billion. British imports from India will also rise by around £1 billion, says  Ms Banga, thereby improving Britain’s balance of trade. Nevertheless, Britain won’t give Indians what it has already given the Chinese, who can now stay for two years for the same $85 visa. The year ending September 2015 showed a 22 per cent rise in visitor visas to the Chinese, who are great shoppers. Reports show that 70 per cent of those who visit Burberry’s in Regent Street are from China. Another fashionable store, Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge, has engaged staff who speak Cantonese and Mandarin. This year Chinese tourists are expected to spend more than £1 billion in Britain, compared with around half that four years ago. Meanwhile, the India-Britain FTA talks threaten to founder on the rock of British recalcitrance over visas. Indian students grumble that they can spend only four months in Britain after qualifying, and that no employer will take them on for training for such a short period. Perhaps not, but as Max Bygraves’ popular lyric had it in the 1950s, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be. Britons aren’t easily disabused of the suspicion that most Indians come to stay.