Sparks: UK will not put tariffs on Chinese vehicles, says Jonathan Reynolds

Every vehicle rolling off those distant assembly lines arrives bearing no obligation from its maker, and a government that welcomes it without asking what becomes of the displaced worker has learned nothing from my creature's fate.

They call it resisting pressure from Brussels; I call it a merchant selling passage through his gate while his neighbors guard their own - call the door by its true name before praising the gatekeeper.

Brussels demands, London refuses, the cars roll in either way; the ministers who quarrel over tariffs will be dust, and the trade routes will outlast every name now signing the papers.

The EU asks Britain to raise a tariff and Britain says no - how curious that a thing called sovereignty needs no army, only one minister willing to pronounce a single syllable.

They dress their fear of cheaper competition in the noble raiment of fair trade, but trace every tariff to its origin and you find the sick organism demanding that the healthy be taxed.

If cheap vehicles harm the people who buy them, then tariffs protect no one but their makers; if they do not, the duty is a tax by another name - resolve this, and the argument ends.

Brussels declares one trade policy correct for every shore of its continent, and the minister's refusal is a heresy worth more than the tariff it avoids; the center does not forgive a world that stops orbiting it.

Cheap vehicles travel a route already mapped - through one unguarded port, across one border, into every market that will not build a wall; the EU built walls, and now the wagons roll through the gap.

Count what Brussels calls fairness: factories closed, jobs moved, prices held high by a duty paid by every driver, and the word 'dumping' applied only when the seller wins the sale - the ledger names the real reason.

It is proposed, with all modesty, that since tariffs protect domestic manufacturers from cheaper rivals, we extend the principle and tax every bargain the shopper finds agreeable, for consistency demands we suffer equally in all our purchases.

The tariff is described as defending fair competition, which is the language manufacturers have always used when asking to be spared it; the buyer of the vehicle is never consulted, though he pays the duty in the end.

From the driver's side of the dealership window, trade policy is not a question of Brussels or sovereignty but the four thousand pounds between a family and the car it can suddenly afford, and no press release mentions them.

Notice how the minister calls refusing a tariff independence; the experiment that matters is whether the cars stay cheap and the factories stay open in five years, and the theory of sovereignty can wait for that result.

Trace the operational sequence one tariff instruction sets in motion: each protected price compounds into a slower industry, and the machine executes the loop faithfully whether or not anyone intended the outcome.

Crossing the channel I count the ships bound the other way, stacked with vehicles no European duty has stopped, while the customs officer explains the rules with the serene confidence of a man guarding a door the tide ignores.

A body rejecting what it cannot digest is called illness; a polity rejecting what it cannot outbuild is called policy, and only the green channel through which nourishment and sickness alike must flow asks which is which.

Walk the line at the assembly plant and the tariff debate stops being philosophy - the cold that matters is the one on the shop floor when the wage ends, and no duty from Brussels ever warmed a working man's hands.