Date: 2023-04-20
Darren Jones: I beg to move, That this House has considered international trade and geopolitics. I thank right hon. and hon. Members from across the House, and the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate today. I declare my interests as set out in the Register of Members' Financial Interests. I applied for this debate because I am concerned about Britain's standing in a world that is changing more quickly than we appear to be responding. From trade and industrial policy to innovation and skills, we have just sticking-plaster policies and no long-term economic plan. There is no strategy for UK plc that shows the path to prosperity, and I hope this debate may trigger some answers from the Government on their plan to drive economic growth within the UK and through exports abroad. The era of increasing globalisation that we have come to know over the past decades is coming to an end. We are now in an era of economic retrenchment, higher levels of state subsidy and new forms of partnership between the public and business, but how is the UK responding? Ministers are merely saying to competitor countries, "This is not how you're supposed to play the game," but they are not listening, and we are losing. There are several factors underpinning these changes: geopolitical competition between China and the United States; war in Europe and security tensions in Asia; the need for democratic nations to show their people that our system of government can deliver good jobs, good pay and prosperity; the net zero transition; and the technological arms race in both its military and civilian contexts. Based on current data, our direction of travel as a country is not a good one. Only this morning, the Government announced that the UK fell from being the fifth largest exporter of goods and services in the world in 2020, to seventh in 2021. Our trade deficit has ballooned from PS2.3 billion to PS23.5 billion, meaning that we are exporting fewer goods and services, while being increasingly dependent on other countries for our own supplies. According to the International Monetary Fund only last week, the UK is set to have one of  the worst economic growth projections of the seven most advanced economies. Even Russia, to our shame, is projected to experience better economic growth than we are. Our drop in exports to the European Union, coupled with the Government's deeply short-sighted decision to agree a trade deal that blocks the sale of most UK-based services to the EU, while allowing the EU to sell services to us, has been a structural blow to the UK economy. In that context, our high levels of national debt, which have increased year on year since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, have put us in a fiscally precarious position. The Government should be ashamed of their record on UK national debt. We all remember David Cameron and George Osborne telling us that the Conservatives would fix the roof while the sun was shining. But what do we have now, 13 years after those promises to the country? A national debt that is projected  to be larger than the entire size of the UK economy. A national debt that has increased year on year--yes, in response to covid and the energy crisis, but it was also increasing year on year before those crises.