The FT's Alan Beattie welcomes the GI

By Penny Hawthorne | 20 July 2005

From a speech at the Globalisation Institute's launch party yesterday by Alan Beattie, the World Trade Editor of the Financial Times:

A couple of months' ago I happened to be on CNN, as I have to do occasionally, and I was talking about the European Union and its brave campaign to prevent the iniquities of the Chinese selling us cheap clothes.

After I verbled on about textiles and quotas for a couple of minutes, the presenter turned to me - this was of course CNN Business Breakfast - and in a tone of utter astonishment as if she were someone from the Spanish Inquisition who had just discovered some heresy said to me: "So what you're saying Alan is that these textiles quotas might actually hurt the European economy?"

And I thought on the way back to the office some people through history must have gone through this as well. "So we have with us on CNN today Mr Galileo, a Galilean from the University of Padua. Mr Galileo, you're saying that the Earth actually goes round the sun?"

And I, having spent this lunchtime debating with Christian Aid on just this issue, have found it astonishing how many of the institutions and agencies that think of themselves as being progressive and being liberal have entirely jumped the fence.

The Church of England I don't have much experience of but what I will say is that my great grandparents who were Manchester free-trade liberals who read the Manchester Guardian, which was a liberal free trade newspaper, would I think be astonished to pick up the modern version of the Manchester Guardian to find that it has leapt the fence from being a free trade newspaper to being a luddite newspaper.

So good luck and welcome!