WHY POLITICIANS LIE ABOUT TRADE By Dmitry Grozoubinski – Canbury Press 2024 If you ask why you should take the time to learn about International Trade, Dmitry Grozoubinski tells you: “the fact that important people keep lying to us about it proves its importance.” He makes no secret of the fact that International Trade is hard to understand; as glutinous and opaque as a silica blancmange. But in this book he spoons it towards our mouths with humour and makes it easy to swallow. The danger of trade is that although we think the detail is boring, any TV vox pop proves that we all think we have a gut instinct for trade. As Grozoubinski says this leaves us open to “confidently spouted rubbish disguised as plain spoken common sense.” Politicians exploit the counter-intuitive nature of trade to skewer us like pike on a hook. In public debate we have also lost, “the art of condensing complexity into punchy soundbites…or crafting an accessible analogy that resonates.”  In this handy book h...

When the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise came together as HM Revenue and Customs in 2005, it  had a solid backbone of officers on the Law Enforcement side (what people generally thought of as Customs officers) backed up by many more International Trade specialists. From the perspective of Cream Team Duty, the Law Enforcement officers checked how many scones you had in your suitcase, while the International Trade officers checked that you'd declared the correct Tariff code for your clotted cream imports. Then, in July 2007, Gordon Brown had a vision of anyone entering the country being met by, "a single, uniformed checkpoint for passport control and customs." In early 2008, those Customs staff were shunted off to the new UK Border Agency. For both sides, there was ambiguity as to who was responsible for what. HMRC still owned Customs policy, but the UKBA was responsible for enforcing it. HMRC retained the International Trade auditors, but UKBA caught the smugglers*. ...