Morality of international trade

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

If you want to watch the reality of modern politics being played out in real time, you could do worse than visit the Parliament petitions website. The petition to prevent Donald Trump from making a State Visit to the UK has now got well over a million signatures. Rather like the spinning figures on a petrol pump, you can see the total rising by the hundreds every minute as people register their moral outrage at the President's executive order banning travel to the US from certain Muslim majority countries. What price should we, as a nation, be willing to pay to make it clear to a foreign nation that their policies are unacceptable? Publicly humiliating Donald Trump by withdrawing, or downgrading, his state visit would certainly send him a message and might win us the equivalent of a diplomatic round of applause around the world, but what impact would that have on our ability to negotiate a favourable trade deal with the US? Would that be a price worth paying? If you draw the line at Donald Trump, how do you feel about the UK signing a £100m arms deal with Turkey - a country that, according to some human rights groups, jails more journalists than any other? These are questions we'll increasingly have to answer in a post-Brexit world where we need to sign deals to replace the trade that might be lost on leaving the EU. People talk euphemistically of "holding their noses" and "supping with a long spoon" in the national interest, but how far should you morally compromise to keep the bottom line in the black? Producer: Phil Pegum.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.
0:03.6	Good evening. It's taken only a matter of days for the new American president to be fixed into the demonology of 21st century politics for what he does as well as what he says.
0:12.9	His ban on refugees and on people from certain Muslim majority countries has caused noise eructions worldwide.
0:19.8	Here, one and three-quarter million people have signed a petition
0:22.2	calling him a vulgar misogynist and demanding his invitation to Buckingham Palace should we
0:27.0	withdrawn. Who needs Trident when we have that ultimate deterrent in our armoury? It's not as if the
0:32.5	Queen has been picky who she's had round to supper in the past. Idi Amin, the madman who killed people by the hundreds of thousands,
0:39.0	is top of an alphabetical list of dictators with whom she has dined.
0:42.9	Bashir al-Assad of Syria, Nikolai Charsescu of Romania,
0:46.9	Mobutu, who plundered billions from Zaire, Mugabe.
0:50.3	None have caused as much fuss as the flaxen-aired new leader of our most important ally.
0:55.9	It would vent outrage, display disapproval, but is it consistent, proportionate, or to be mercenary about it,
1:02.2	worth the cost of offending such a powerful trade and security partner?
1:06.3	Or is the hoo-har about Trump, like the fuss about selling arms to Turkey or buying oil from the Saudis,
1:12.0	part of a modern passion for virtue signalling that comes at the expense of trade, jobs and
1:16.6	prosperity. When should morality Trump, so to speak, the national interest? Our moral maze tonight,
1:22.7	the panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times, the former Conservative
1:26.1	Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, and the Anglican priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. Melanie Phillips, would you have him round to dinner, or is that not the point? I don't think it's the point at all. I think that there is a line to be drawn in terms of who you treat with, who a country should treat with. And I think
1:45.5	that people have a right to protest. My problem with what's being done against President Trump is
1:51.1	that this is a demonisation process based on a great deal of distortion and inconsistencies designed
1:56.5	to delegitimize him and frustrate the democratic will of the American people.
2:00.7	Matthew?
	...

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