The Gate That Nobody Built

There is a gate across the road from Shanghai to Stuttgart, and the European Union has lately hung it there in the shape of duties on Chinese electric cars. Across the water, the British government has looked at this gate and announced, through Mr Jonathan Reynolds, that it sees no reason to hang one of its own. Now the old rule of fences is that the man who wants to pull one down must first go away and discover why it was put up. But the British are not pulling anything down. They are merely declining to build. This is a far subtler heresy, because nobody is ever blamed for a fence he never raised, and so nobody is ever obliged to explain why his neighbour raised his.

Consider first the complaint from Brussels that the United Kingdom will become a back door for cheap Chinese cars into Europe. A back door is a door in a shared house. For years the British insisted, with great noise and some expense, that they lived in a separate house, and the Europeans agreed with equal noise and greater paperwork. What divided the two houses was not sentiment but rules of origin, the dull clerical machinery that decides whether a car is British enough to cross the Channel without paying duty. A Chinese car unloaded at Southampton does not become English by standing in the English rain. It must be substantially made here before Europe lets it through free. That lock was forged by Brussels itself during the divorce. So the alarm about the back door is a curious confession. Either the lock works, in which case there is no door, or it does not, in which case Brussels should be quarrelling with its own locksmith and not with Mr Reynolds.

The British case deserves to be stated at its strongest, because it is strong. A family in Stoke that wants an electric car finds the Chinese one cheaper, and a tariff would simply take money from that family and hand it to the Treasury, or to a German shareholder, in the name of a factory the family has never seen. Britain makes comparatively few of the small, cheap cars the Chinese sell, and so, the argument runs, there is little native industry to shelter and a great deal of household budget to spare. The government wants the roads electrified and the motorists grateful. On these terms the open gate is not negligence but generosity.

And yet the Europeans did not build their fence out of a love of expensive cars, which no continent has ever possessed. They built it because they suspect that the cheapness is not a price but a policy, underwritten by a state that is prepared to lose money on every car until there is nobody left to compete with it. A fence against a flood is not a fence against water. The question Mr Reynolds must answer is not whether cheap cars are good, which everyone grants, but whether this particular cheapness is the sort that lasts. I have seen a market town where a great shop opened with bread sold below cost. It was a wonderful season for anyone buying bread, and it continued to be wonderful right up until the morning the last baker put up his shutters and the price of bread remembered itself.

The British automotive industry is not an abstraction. It is a fitter in the Midlands or on Wearside who will buy the cheap car on Saturday with wages that depend on the dear car on Monday. The economist sees him as two people, a consumer to be pleased and a producer to be pitied, and tallies the pleasure against the pity in a column. The man himself knows he is only one person, and he knows that the pleasure goes very quickly once the pay packet stops.

Here, then, the paradox resolves. The truly radical thing about the British position is not that it refuses a tariff but that it has won the right to refuse one. Britain fought, wisely or otherwise, to own its own gate. A man who has fought for a gate and then never asks what it is for has not achieved independence. He has achieved a hinge. Mr Reynolds may be entirely right that Brussels has no business telling London where to put its fences. But he would be wrong to suppose that leaving the gate open is the absence of a decision. It is a decision, and a large one, made in the comfortable belief that nothing unpleasant is coming down the road.

A gate left open is still a gate. It is merely one that the wind has been put in charge of.