Governments like to claim that globalisation means that our destiny is beyond their control. That’s wrong.

Cruising up the Channel last week before docking in the Netherlands, was a Chinese vessel that carried 7,000 electric cars. All were manufactured in China, all will undercut rival products made in Europe, and all benefited from state subsidies and energy prices far lower than those in Britain.

Nothing demonstrates better the absurdity of the myth of international free trade, the failure of the model of globalisation pursued by Western governments for more than two decades, and green policies that have driven industrial production from countries with higher environmental standards to those with little or none.

In Britain, policy has deliberately increased the cost of energy. Yet expensive energy makes British goods less competitive. In foreign markets and at home, British companies lose out to foreign rivals, with cheaper inputs, lower labour market standards, and higher carbon emissions. The Telegraph has the story.

Many consider this progress, but it will soon come to be seen as serious economic, social and geopolitical self-harm.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Britain generally had the third most competitive industrial electricity costs of the G7 economies. But since then we have performed far worse. In the five years before Tony Blair became prime minister, our industrial electricity costs were around 9 per cent higher than the average of the advanced economies comprising the International Energy Agency. By 2010, they were nearly 23 per cent higher, and for the past five years have risen to 52 per cent higher.

Most European countries have seen prices rise dramatically since Russia invaded Ukraine. But compare British prices with specific countries and the difference is shocking. Our industrial electricity prices are three times higher than in America and Canada. 

They are more than twice as high as in Korea and New Zealand. They are about twice as high as those in European countries – Finland, France and Sweden – with a strong nuclear energy sector, and much higher than those – like Germany and Poland – still using coal to generate power.

In China, responsible for 53 per cent of global coal consumption, and where coal generates 61 per cent of electricity, industrial electricity prices are around a quarter of those in Britain. Add to this low Chinese labour costs and the enormous subsidies provided through cheap loans and steel, and it is clear that this is not free or fair trade at all. Meanwhile, emissions associated with imports to Britain from China have risen 62 per cent since the late 1990s.

We can blame China for abusing the world trading system it joined almost a quarter of a century ago – and indeed the European Union is threatening to impose tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles – but the real problem is with Western naivety. 

China was always going to flout the rules and use the system to its own advantage, and for years Western governments turned a blind eye as it did so: stealing industrial secrets, subsidising whole sectors and dumping surplus goods.

These electric cars are really only a more visible example of what has been going on across industry for at least two decades. One result has been the empowerment of China – a strategic threat and a hostile state – to the extent that it openly backs Russia in Ukraine, undermines international institutions, such as the World Health Organisation, corrupts and sets debt traps for foreign governments, threatens Taiwan and even India, and talks up confrontation in the Pacific with America.

Read the full story here.