So, who should pay for childcare?

This is not, in fact, quite true:

With the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, looking at measures that could reduce childcare costs, which are some of the most expensive in the world,

The Chancellor is not looking at reducing childcare costs. He is looking at altering who has to pay them.

…demanding action on increasing state help

Quite.

Of the parents surveyed, 70% said they would work more if childcare were available for free. Treasury insiders accept that childcare costs are one factor keeping some people out of the labour market.

But this opens up that question which all too few are willing to discuss. OK, taking care of children is something that must be done and is expensive when it is done. So, who should be carrying those costs?

There are three - and only three - possible alternatives.

The first is that parents, in some mixture, take care of their own children.

The second is that parents work in order to earn the money to pay someone else to take care of their children.

The third is that taxpayers pay to take care of their children. Or, as that can also be put, everyone else in the country has to go to work in order to care for the children of those original parents.

An illustration of this happens to also be in the papers:

Which is to say, I birthed two babies in relatively quick succession, looked at the cost of childcare (£42.5k a year for a baby and a two-year-old in my part of London, towards which the government will contribute up to £2k a child under the tax-free childcare scheme), and decided that staying home made more sense than putting them in nursery and desperately trying to earn enough to break even.

So, the cost of caring for those two children is £42.5k a year. That’s just the cost. It doesn’t change whether it’s the parents doing it themselves, the parents working to pay it or everyone else being taxed £42.5k a year to pay for it.

That is, no one at all is talking about making childcare free, the only conversation happening is over who should carry the cost of childcare?

The argument in favour of the taxpayer picking up the tab is that there is some benefit to society - it makes us richer in some economic or possibly even moral manner - in the taxpayer doing so. Children are better looked after by paid labour perhaps. Or the value of the work done by the now freed-up mother (for it will likely be the mother who is the stay-at-home parent) is more than the value of the work lost by pulling some other young woman (for it will likely be a young woman doing the childcare) out of some other job to care for children. The problem with that second argument is that if this were so then the wages gained by the mother working would be enough to cover the cost of employing the other.

But this is the question that does need answering. Not, at all, whether childcare should be made free simply because childcare never will be free. There’s a cost and expense to it. The only thing that can be discussed is who is it that should be carrying that cost? Either in their own labour opportunities foregone, in the spending of the fruits of their own labour or in a slice off the top of everyone else’s labour?

Well, which should it be?

One answer we’re convinced is wrong is the Edwardian one, which is that finally the government should take action to solve the servant problem. So, other than that, what is the correct answer over the distribution of these costs?

Promoting growth and innovation

In recent years, many economists have proposed that a growth agenda with lower taxes is essential for the UK's long-term economic success. They argue that by reducing taxes, the UK can stimulate economic growth and create more jobs, which will ultimately benefit the entire country.

One of the most prominent economists who supports this view is Arthur Laffer, of Laffer Curve fame. It represents the relationship between tax rates and government revenue. Laffer argues that reducing tax rates can increase government revenue by stimulating economic growth and increasing tax compliance. This idea has been demonstrated in practice by countries such as Ireland, which reduced its corporate tax rate in the 1990s and saw a surge in economic growth and foreign investment. The UK saw this work with the Lawson tax cuts of the 1980s

Another US economist who backed a growth agenda with lower taxes was Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Friedman argued that high taxes can lead to a "deadweight loss" in the economy by discouraging work, investment, and entrepreneurship. By lowering taxes, the government can encourage more economic activity and ultimately generate more revenue in the long run.

By reducing taxes, the government can stimulate economic growth, create more jobs, and increase government revenue in the long run. This, in turn, can lead to higher wages, better living standards, and increased prosperity. Of course, there will always be those who argue that lower taxes will lead to a reduction in public services, but this need not be the case if the government is able to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

One very important way to promote growth is to encourage innovation. UK companies need to invest in research and development. Increasing private sector investment in innovation can create a culture of innovation in the UK. Giving tax breaks to those who invest in innovation can set minds looking for ways to innovate. Encouraging collaboration between businesses and universities can also help in this regard.

The regulatory environment for innovators could be more supportive than it is. Regulation should be designed to encourage innovation, not hinder it. This includes ensuring intellectual property laws are clear and well-defined, as well as having regulations that promote competition and entrepreneurship, and make life easier for new market entrants with innovative products and processes.

A culture of encouraging entrepreneurship can lead to the development of innovative ideas and businesses. Providing training and resources to entrepreneurs can also help to promote innovation. There could be annual awards for innovative achievers to highlight their activities and to encourage emulation.

This mixture of low taxes, more investment in innovation and creating a climate of entrepreneurship is not some kind of witches brew dreamed up by theoreticians. It is a combination that has been shown to work in practice, and offers an attractive alternative to the decade of stagnation that might ensue if it is not applied in the UK.

The 15-minute city problem - Who decides?

There’s much spluttering from the professional planning classes over this opposition to 15-minute cities. This is just the latest:

Imagine an old-fashioned British country town. Good citizens strolling down the high street to their friendly baker, grocer and butcher, relaxing in pubs and on cricket fields, their children walking to school, “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” as John Major, quoting George Orwell, once put it. This, surely, is the sort of thing Conservatives like.

But no. According to Nick Fletcher, Tory MP for the South Yorkshire constituency of the Don Valley, this way of living is an “international socialist concept”. Specifically, he fears and loathes the idea of the “15-minute city” developed by the Colombian-born Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, which proposes that most of what you need or want – places of work, homes, shopping, education, sport, social life, pleasure – be within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride, as in a traditional town or city. This, says Fletcher, who seems to be drawing on some of the nuttier claims on the internet, “will take away personal freedoms”. It’s a case of lunacy on stilts as virtuoso as any in the world of conspiracy theories. It also highlights a central question of modern conservatism: do they actually want to conserve things?

There was a similar harrumph and dismissal as lunacy from The Guardian’s planning and architecture guru last week.

To be clear - there’s nothing wrong with 15-minute cities. The only interesting or important question is who decides? For undoubtedly some people do like the idea of being able to amble around to all the bits that make life a fun thing. One of us lived in central Bath for years on exactly that basis. How excellent, etc. But there are others who do not enjoy that rural amiability transferred to the urban core. London, with its teeming 8 million, excites more. Or perhaps at a stage of life it does as it did for that same one of us. Or what about the 9 million Britons who live entirely more rurally and to whom having near anything within 15 minutes of them would be an anathema?

The mistake here - and the thing to be revolted by and revolt against - is the ghastly pomposity of those planners. Having noted that some like 15 minutes they then decide that they’d better impose it upon everyone. Which isn’t, at all, how the world is supposed to work.

As Jane Jacobs was fond of pointing out the desirable cityscape, that urban environment, is something that grows organically, not something that is planned or imposed. The 15 minutes isn’t the international socialist conspiracy, it’s the imposition of the one plan fits all which is.

This is not a new mistake of course. As it happens Roy Hattersley talks about his work in Sheffield 60 years back:

He claimed, with the authority that came from years of poverty on Labour party pay, that the working man’s ambition was to live in a “decent-sized cottage with a bit of garden at the back”

So, instead and of course, they built stack-a-prole worker flats in the worst Brezhneviki style of a kind which stemmed from “an admiration for the brutalist housing developments in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.”

We see the same even further back than that, in David Kynaston’s (“A World To Build” etc) collections of Mass Observation notes. The planners were going to stick the bombed-out working classes into tower blocks instead of the des res with front and back garden desired. After all, Europeans lived like that therefore so should the English.

One problem with this being that a different population with a different culture might not desire that same style of housing. The other being that the planners hadn’t actually understood the European housing culture. Those flats near always come with the country cottage (oversized allotment, dacha, chalupa and so on). The flats are to huddle in for the winter, those country places - normally in a wide ring right around the town or city, where we seem to have Green Belt that cannot be disturbed - to expand into over the summer. The European system depends, that is - to a large extent - on everyone having a holiday home.

Not only were the planners trying to impose an alien housing culture they didn’t even understand the one they were trying to impose. No, allotments don’t make up the gap for what is the one absolute about a British allotment? You’re not allowed to stay there overnight nor build anything even remotely shack-like where anyone could.

Planning by the informationally incompetent does not a happy society make. But then there’s the grand problem being faced by planners. The UK currently has, apparently, 67.33 million people. That’s therefore - by definition - 67.33 million individual utility functions. The aim of society being to optimise, as best is possible, each and every one of those 67.33 million utility functions. It is impossible for the central planner to even know what these utility functions are let alone how to optimise them. Therefore central planning does not work as a method of optimisation.

But the grand delusion of the very idea of scientific socialism is that the planner can know and can optimise. Which is why we’ve had this past century of British architects and city planners attempting to force-feed the population into urban landscapes which aren’t, in fact, optimising. As at the top, it’s that forcing which is the socialist conspiracy.

The grand lesson of the 20th century is that socialist planning doesn’t work. We, humanity, did test that model to its destruction. So, dear urban planners, please stop trying to impose that not just clapped out but proven to be wrong model.

In fact, don’t just stop trying to plan cities, please go away.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, and Warren Buffett, on hamburgers

One rather cynical lesson that can be filleted out of Wealth of Nations is that human beings are stupid, greedy and lazy. Not that it’s put in quite those words of course. But it’s difficult to find new things to do - the stupidity. We’re greedy, in that if we see someone making better than normal profits then we’ll copy them. We’re lazy, in that we’re rarely willing to put in that hard work to overcome the stupidity in finding the new things to do.

Add those all together and we find that new things that actually work are rare enough, those that are found get copied and the better than normal profits quickly disappear under the roaring waves of competition:

During the early 2010s, upmarket burger chains could do no wrong and were expanding like wildfire. New brands such as Honest Burger sprung from nowhere to become upstart chains, while US outlets Five Guys and Shake Shack decided to plant their flags on British soil.

At its peak, Byron was generating £90m in sales from 70 sites across the UK.

That idea of a burger that tasted better than the packaging was surprisingly difficult to find. When it was it was widely copied. Leading to oversupply:

The picture is very different now. Byron has collapsed and been sold not once but twice since the onset of the pandemic as costs surged and demand plummeted. Just 12 of its restaurants remain.

It is not alone: Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK), an earlier pioneer of the posh burger, called in administrators in 2020 and has shrunk from 85 sites to just 36.

Honest Burgers, meanwhile, has been forced to cut staff and renegotiate loans.

The posh burger boom has well and truly gone stale.

The end result is that all consumers who desire an edible burger gain that opportunity, the capitalists are back to normal profits - at best - and all driven by the usual combination of capitalist greed, human laziness and market competition.

We can also approach the same point, as Warrren Buffett does, from the other end. He is famed as an investor for only wanting to put his money where there is a “moat”. Something that protects profits from that roaring competition. On exactly the same grounds. Only those businesses which have the moat which prevents the competition are going to make above normal profits over the long term.

The lesson to draw from this is that it is the free part of free markets which is important. It’s that surge of competition to something making excess profits which benefits the consumer - our aim and point in our having an economy at all. So, we must preserve that free part, that freedom of entry into the market, above all else.

In the absence of special conditions which create those moats it is that free part which means that she’ll be right. Might take a bit of time, sure, but she will.

We'd better abolish social housing then

The problem with far too much economic, even social, commentary is that near no one asks Thomas Sowell’s important question, “Compared to what?”

We’ve been told that privately owned, owner occupied, housing is bad, terrible, no good. For some set of complex reasons rooted in the idea that property is theft perhaps. We’ve also been told, and policy has acted upon, the idea that private rentals are bad, terrible, no good. Why should anyone be able to profit from something as essential as another’s need for a roof over their head?

There’s not really much left as an alternative except for the idea of some sort of socially owned housing which is then rented. But this is now being described as terrible, bad, no good:

This squalor was supposed to be her fresh start. After some hard years, the 38-year-old had just got remarried and fancied a new life in the suburbs of London. On viewing, she’d had some worries, but the family were assured that central heating and double glazing would arrive at the property before they did. They were even asked to pick a colour for the new door. And since those promises came from the country’s biggest housing association, Clarion, Sultan believed them.

Bad move.

The thrust of the piece is indeed that this communal, charitable, model is also terrible, no good, bad. As with Awaab Ishak, where the two year old’s death was laid at the door of a social housing provider.

At which point the argument seems to have rather boxed itself into a corner. All housing models - private ownership, private rental, social rental - are terrible, no good, bad.

So what do we do now then? Ask Sowell’s question - compared to what?

Not, what is the housing system that produces no bad outcomes because as the complaint is there isn’t one of those. Which is the system which produces the least horrors and the most benefits? That is, compare the models to each other, not against some list of impossibilities.

We’re not, here, about to insist upon any one of the three. That’s not the point we wish to make, even though we’ve clearly got views. The point we do insist upon though is that we’ve got to be asking the right question.

Which is not what is a theoretically perfect housing system? Rather, among the systems that are possible which is, while comparing the real world results against each other, the best we can do?

We do tend to think that at least a modicum of capitalist and market rigour would be a more than useful ingredient of such a better system. That people lose money, jobs, for being bad at housing management seems to us to be an incentivising ingredient of any system. But that’s just us projecting our more general tendencies onto this one specific problem.

The standard analysis of British housing is now moving to the idea that all three possible systems are terrible, bad, no good. Shrug, OK, which is the least bad then?

Who guards the guards?

The Carillion collapse in 2016 prompted widespread agreement that UK auditors needed more effective regulation. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is supposed to do that but it has come under much criticism, for example in December 2018:

“Two major Select Committees have accused it, in the strongest terms, of timidity, a lack of pace and excessive closeness to those it regulates.”

My own experience testifies to that.  Brands are the most valuable assets many companies own. In the 1990s, we tried to persuade the FRC to recommend that companies placed their values on their balance sheets. After all, if balance sheets do not inform people about their most valuable assets, what are balance sheets for?

We were wasting our breath.  The FRC was totally unable to grasp what a “brand” is? 30 years on, a company can put the price paid for a brand on the balance sheet, but not its value (unless it has declined), still less the value of any brand the company already owns.

In short, we can all agree that UK auditors need better regulation, that the FRC, despite recent improvements, is dominated by the Big Four auditors, and should be removed, not reformed. Six years on, what was formerly BEIS announced that the:

“Government will revamp the UK’s corporate reporting and audit regime through a new regulator, greater accountability for big business and by addressing the dominance of the main audit firms.”

The FRC was to be replaced by a new, stronger regulator – the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA) – with tougher enforcement powers. But where in all this is the professional body?

The government does not tell doctors how to practice medicine nor solicitors how to practice law. And regulators are proving a mixed blessing: Ofgem has presided over a huge transfer of money from impoverished consumers to Centrica, Shell, BP and other fat cat energy providers, whilst Ofwat sanctions sewage filling our rivers.  Ofcom allows price rises well above inflation. 

For a start, it is absurd that the auditors, whose job to is ensure the company’s directors are behaving themselves, are hired, fired and have their remunerations set by those same directors. Hang on, you may say, surely large companies have audit committees.  They do:

“An audit committee is made of members of a company's board of directors and oversees its financial statements and reporting.”

The solution is simple: audit committees should be mandatory for all large or listed companies but they should comprise members elected directly by shareholders, not directors, and should have responsibility for hiring, firing and remunerating auditors.

Secondly, the professional body should set auditing standards and police their adherence in a similar way to other professions. In this case, what is the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), with its 165,119 members and, according to its 2021 accounts, £53.6M membership fees and £33.7M net surplus after tax doing with all that money? Similar comments apply to Chartered Accountants in Scotland and Ireland.

Well of course the ICAEW does do regulation but that is delegated to its Regulatory Board (IRB) which in turn has delegated that to the Professional Standards Department (PSD). That again is delegated to the Regulatory Practice & Policy (RPP) and the Quality Assurance (QAD) teams.

Then there is the important role played by the Professional Conduct Department (PCD) which ensures there is an effective deterrent against poor conduct or poor-quality work. And, lest we forget the IRB also has general oversight of the performance of Professional Standards committees. Is it any wonder that this bureaucracy does not want to tangle with the big players?

The government should abandon its plan to replace the FRC with another, almost certainly useless, regulator but put the ICAEW on notice to become the tough professional body it should be or lose its Royal Charter.  That was given in 1880 by Queen Victoria, left intact for 68 years and fiddled about with ever since, most recently 1994.

The relevance here is that solving the Carillion, or quis custodiet, problem does not require legislation, just a quick decision by the Privy Council.

No, no, really, this is not how the economy works

Please, do try to get this right:

One of the central premises of net zero is that the resulting job destruction in old industries such as car-making, but also oil and gas exploration, construction and farming, will be more than offset by the job creation in green industries such as renewable energy

No. Or at least anyone thinking that is hopelessly misinformed.

We do not hope that any replacement technology produces as many jobs as we had supplying that same thing before. Precisely and exactly the opposite. We desire, insist upon in fact, precisely the opposite. We want there to be fewer jobs in this new way of doing things than there were in the old.

Think on it. Before tractors (or perhaps that whole agricultural revolution thing) we had 90% of all people standing in muddy fields wondering how the green grass grows. Then we got tractors and we ended up with 2% of the population as farmers. We did not then move 88% of the people, of the jobs, into making tractors - nor other bits of the agricultural revolution. We moved 1 or 2% into supplying that new agricultural technology, sure. But 86% of the people went off and did other things. Danced ballet, staffed the NHS, taught kids to read, built computers and so on. Tractors made us richer not by the amount of food we got, but by the ballet, NHS, literacy and computers we got as a result of tractors.

We do not want the replacement tech to produce as many jobs. We want the replacement tech to require less human labour so we can be made richer by the labour of humans at sating other desires.

We’re afraid that it gets worse. If the jobs lost are to be more than offset then that means productivity falls.

No, really. Imagine we kill off fossil fuels and replace with renewables. Renewables create more jobs than fossil fuels - The Green Party has crowed about this in every election manifesto for decades now. But what is the product, production, here? The energy required to power society. And if we say that the energy to power society now requires more human labour then we’ve just insisted upon lowering productivity. Because that’s what productivity is, value of output by the hours of human labour it takes to create that output.

The entire political world shouts about how British labour productivity isn’t rising, or not fast enough. Then everyone insists that we must lower it by having renewables? Well, yes, actually that is what is happening. Because far too few actually grasp the basics of economics. Note that the above isn’t neoliberal, it’s not even neoclassical. It’s simply a statement of fact. If we start to employ more people in gaining our energy then we’ve just lowered labour productivity in energy production. Because that’s what productivity means, requiring how much labour to gain how much output?

No wonder we’ve economic problems if the ruling class think that we want new techs to produce more jobs than the old they replace. That’s entirely and wholly wrong. The entire point of new techs is to require less human labour so that other needs and desires can be addressed by that newly freed up scarce resource, human labour.

It's not the capitalism or socialism that matters so much, it's the markets and competition

A useful definition of capitalism is that it’s the capitalists who own the assets. Of socialism that those same assets are owned socially. Therefore things like workers’ co-ops are socialist, capitalist owned corporations are capitalist. It may well be that some have a preference for one or the other, could well be that one model or t’other works better in certain circumstances. But it’s not actually the vital division in economic or societal thinking:

Waitrose is to cut prices across hundreds of grocery staples as it battles to win back cash-strapped middle class shoppers.

The supermarket chain said it had invested a record £100m in cheaper items with nearly a quarter of price cuts being lowered by 20pc.

Fresh vegetables, meats and cheese are among the 300 Waitrose own-brand items getting cheaper, with a 1kg bag of carrots falling from 60p to 50p and Savoy cabbages dropping from 90p each to 70p.

Waitrose is owned by the John Lewis partnership, itself a workers’ co-operative. They are not slicing prices - and thereby raising consumer real incomes and living standards - because they are lovely and touchy feely, nor because they are socialists. But because they face competition from those markedly capitalist organisations Aldi, Lidl, Sainsburys, Morrisons and so on (respectively, family owned, family owned, stock market listed, private equity). Aldi, Lidl, Sainsburys, Morrisons, all also have to compete against the Waitrose price cuts in order to keep their own customers.

The thing that increases those living standards of the population is the competition between the varied organisations, not the ownership structure of the organisations. The thing to monitor and preserve is thus the competition, not the ownership.

Entirely true that monopoly capitalism would not be a happy place but fortunately we’ve never had that. We have been able to observe monopoly socialism and that was entirely dire as the 20th century experience showed us.

As long as those ownership structures are voluntarily entered into we’re intensely relaxed about those ownership structures. It’s monopoly, the absence of competition in markets, which is the thing to be abjured.

Government should stick to its knitting

Back in the 1980s, Sir Robin Ibbs got the Thatcher Cabinet to recognise that good civil servants were not usually good managers and vice versa. He persuaded them, with some difficulty, that there should be only two types of units in future:

1. A core unit - responsible for policy and money.

2. The executive agencies - responsible for delivering the required objectives, i.e. the managers. 

Unfortunately, they both continued to be called “civil servants” which rather blurred the distinction. Quangos, i.e. non-departmental public bodies staffed by public, not civil, servants, would cease to exist. The revolution never happened partly because the civil service number 1 skill is resisting change and also because incoming ministers are completely untrained and never understood it.  They still don’t.

Now would be a good time, with cross-party agreement, to follow Ibbs’ logic. Government should fund public services but that does not mean it should provide them. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) routinely makes a mess of managing the NHS and fails to fund social care. The solution is obvious enough: abolish the DHSC.  The Levelling Up department already funds social care; it might as well fund the NHS too.  The NHS would become a public corporation, like the Bank of England, and it would no longer be managed by civil servants.

Evidence of the government’s managerial incompetence is provided by this winter of discontent. Strikes are bad news for employers, employees and customers/users alike. There are many variations on Napoleon’s observation that problems are never down to bad soldiers; their leaders will be to blame. The problems are exacerbated by government’s tendency to want to find national standard solutions rather than allowing natural units, e.g. hospital trusts, to find their own.

Further evidence is routinely provided by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). When I was a 2nd lieutenant in Singapore in charge of supplies, the MoD was, mercifully, so far away we mostly had to look after ourselves. No trouble. Today MoD-purchased materiel is over budget, years late and defective. We need, maybe, a few hundred in an MoD core to design policy and fight the Treasury for money but, beyond that, the armed forces should be seen as a public corporation staffed by professionals, not civil servants.

Arts Council England employs (using the word loosely) 639 people when all it should do is pass on the money it receives to arts providers according to a set of criteria. That should not need more than 39 people, and not the other 600 who spend their time telling arts deliverers what they should do.

Over 40 museums and galleries were part of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2022 and are a classic example of public services that should be funded, but not provided, by government. Why should ministers designate who sits on their boards? The February 2023 reshuffle has broken up the DCMS but added departments when they should be reduced.

The bottom line here is that those functions which should not be part of government at all should become independent public corporations, notably the NHS, the armed forces and delivering public services or returned to the judiciary if that is where they belong, e.g. managing law courts.

That would allow government, following Ibbs, to focus on policy and financial matters in its core departments, staffed by civil servants, and executive agencies, staffed by public servants, for delivering those policies. A better focused government would do a better job.

Patrick Minford and going bananas about trade

At the heart of Patrick Minford’s analysis of Brexit is the very Smithian observation that it’s the imports part of trade which makes us rich. This is derived from Smith’s point that consumption is the purpose of all production. If we get to consume more, more cheaply, then we are richer - more consumption, cheaper, being what buying from the most efficient global producers allows us to do. It’s imports that make us rich.

Therefore now that we have the freedom to set our own trade rules again we should simply state that we are free traders. As with the Britain of 1846. We will impose no trade barriers to anything from anywhere, no quotas, no tariffs, only the same product consistency and safety laws that we apply to domestic production.

Then things go bananas:

Bananas could be more expensive in Northern Ireland than the rest of the UK when a deal is struck on the Protocol, Brexiteers have warned.

The Government is considering slashing UK tariffs on bananas from Peru, Colombia and Ecuador next year, which will make them cheaper.

But Brussels could insist that bananas sent to Northern Ireland from Great Britain pay a higher EU tariff if it deems them at risk of crossing into the Republic.

Now, what the EU insists upon for Northern Ireland is another matter. The question is why do we have any tariffs upon Peru, Ecuador and Colombia at all? Further, why in heck did we raise them upon Brexit?

Banana importers, distributors and retailers in the UK face a period of major uncertainty after it was confirmed that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit where continuity agreements have not yet been signed with key Latin American suppliers, the UK will lift its banana import tariff rate to €114 per tonne.

We don’t need a free trade agreement to not make ourselves poorer in that manner. Just insist that we’re not going to tax ourselves on our consumption of that waxy yellowness. There, we’re done. Instead we have this sort of silliness:

The UK has a standard tariff of 12 per cent on all imported goods which are not covered by trade agreements.

This means that products like oranges and bananas are hit with a tax of 12 per cent even though there are no orange or banana farmers in the UK to protect.

We just don’t need trade agreements in order to not make ourselves poorer. The imports are the thing we desire, the imports are what make us richer, why are we putting barriers in the way of us getting what we want? After all, the entire point of Brexit is that this is all now, again, under our own control.

We do now have the political power to abolish all tariffs and quotas upon imports. We should do so, obviously, anything else is just bananas.