Theresa May and the Brexit cause, stuck with each other, face being unravelled by a common threat: Few things in politics hit home harder than a rise in the price of food

As prices threaten to rise, Theresa May, pictured in her time as Home Secretary, is faced with the same challenge that took down the plans of her hero Joseph Chamberlain. Photograph: Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Home Secretary, at 'The Pioneers: Police and Crime Commissioners, one year on', by the Policy Exchange (License) (Cropped)

Joseph Chamberlain's vision for Britain was an Empire behind a wall of protectionist trade tariffs - literally taxing imports in order to force the use of domestic and colonial resources. Chamberlain's campaign was ultimately defeated when it became clear that protection also gouged prices, increasing the cost of basic necessities like food.

Prime Minister Theresa May seems set to emulate her hero. In the past few weeks, just the fear and uncertainty of a future Brexit alone has been enough to upset investors, which restricts the access to the credit needed to get things done; to decrease the value of the pound, and therefore its purchasing power; and to start squabbles between suppliers and retailers over the price of food.

That is not a great early sign for the May Ministry. Nothing is likely to threaten the long term longevity of a Government than sharp increase in the cost of food. Most policy can be abstracted or explained away with excuses. But little hits home more directly than it being more expensive just to eat. Having hitched her leadership to the abandoned Brexit wagon, their success and failure now appear entwined.

Remain and Leave

Now, unlike during Chamberlain's days, in terms of how the arguments were made, the debate between keeping EU membership and leaving the EU was not supposed to be a straight contest between free trade and protection. Rather, the two sides were in theory presenting different ways to go about free trade. Supporters of the European system saw a free trade area gradually pushing back barriers, while its detractors saw rules and regulations preventing business exploiting opportunities with the emerging economies beyond Europe.

Yet what looks to be an increasingly drastic withdrawal from Europe looks set to have much the same impact as throwing up a wall of import taxes. Withdrawal from the Single Market, as now seems to be on the cards, would put Britain on the outside of Europe's own tariff barriers. That would in essence subject Britain to all the negatives of trade barriers without any of the benefit of recouping tax receipts, since it would be British exports to Europe facing taxes, not the other way around.

And there is little that could be more damning for the Leavers' approach than driving up prices. If there is one thing that free trade offers, through the opportunity to operate at scale, its a reduction in the cost of doing business and therefore, theoretically, a reduction in prices.

Free Trade and Free Movement

When Richard Cobden and John Bright led the Anti-Corn Law League campaign against tariffs, it was to fight the protection it afforded to landowning aristocratic that drove up the price of bread. Keeping down the price of food was one a core group of goals for the free traders of mid-nineteenth century. They also saw in free trade the chance to build a lasting peace between European nations.

The Single Market, formerly known as the Common Market, was the realisation of a century of efforts by Europe's free traders to realise those possibilities - to bring Europe together in peace with a vast barrier-free trade area.

But building that barrier free area has required a massive regulatory reform process. Some on the Right have portrayed those efforts as a nightmare of expensive and restrictive bureaucratic red tape. Yet to the crafters of the free trade area it has been an essential effort to match up the trading standards, on everything from packaging to safety, in all of the member countries - so that no product or service is faced with expensive and restrictive internal barriers.

That process of taking barriers led one of the biggest, most profound and most controversial removals of internal barriers: free movement of labour. As of the vital resources of business, labour has received the same treatment as other barriers to trade, from the standardization of rights to free movement across traditional borders - allowing labour to be where it is needed most and rewarded best.

Freedom and Fear

It is also the change most provocative to what has become the established European order. Europe that went from being divided between lords to being divided rigidly between nations. It still does not seem ready for the prospect or reality of no dividing lines.

To be clear: it is absolutely right to review trade policy. The free traders of the nineteenth century sought to break open, for the general benefit, a state protected cartel of aristocratic landlords. But today's economy is very different and what might have broken one cartel could easily feed another.

The European system is certainly not without issues. The area itself was formed through technocratic standardization rather than purely through the removal of restrictions on business - enough alone to provoke an argument over the definition of 'free' trade.

However. Going back to a world of trade barriers, of tariffs and protectionist import taxes, opens again the box of vested interests being subsidised by the state and of endless trade treaties that it will take never ending public vigilance to keep in check. And pursuing any path motivated by fear, to throw up barriers and restrictions and take away liberties out of arbitrary discrimination, is dangerous.

The Path Ahead

Europe's social fabric is fraying and the walls between nations are going back up. Fears over living standards, paucity of secure housing and lack of opportunities - fueled by years of austerity's chronic denial of public investment - are closing off the EU's member states one by one and turning them inwards.

In the midst of this, Theresa May has bought into the Brexit cause. She has taken it on as her mandate. Her hero Chamberlain saw his efforts thwarted by free traders pointing out an inconvenient truth: that food was too expensive because of a grain cartel his policies supported.

May's Government has inherited a fragile economy in which food prices are just beginning to threaten a rise. Will the Prime Minister be able to act fast and head off the threat? Or will her government go the same way as the protectionist Conservative & Unionists of her idol?

The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum: 4 things you should know about TTIP, free trade and the European Union

One of the most controversial elements of the UK's membership of the European Union, at present, is the TTIP - Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - trade deal. Between the United States and the European Union, it is intended to break down trade barriers limiting free trade.

The prospective deal has been controversial from the start - being assembled in negotiations deemed secret, under a cloud of fear that business is being given legal rights to seek recompense from governments for profit-hurting policy, reduce Europe's regulatory standards and open protected domestic institutions to aggressive corporate competition.

I: The EU is only what you make of it

The misconception here is that the EU is a distinct, abstract institution, pursuing its own agenda - thus imagining the deal to be the work of the EU alone, with exit a simple blocking measure. But the EU doesn't work like that. It is driven by a council of the governments of the member states, including the UK.

Right now, Britain's representative are David Cameron's government and the Prime Minister has argued forcefully in favour of TTIP. Leaving the EU is not going to stop the UK's Conservative government seeking the pass TTIP-type trade agreement.

The basic reality is that the opposition to TTIP is to be found in Europe, not out of it. In Germany, 250,000 people have marched against the treaty. In France, the government is opposing the treaty for the way it threatens its protection policy covering certain of its own domestic interests. The movements are right in step with the major concerns over the treaty in Britain.

II: Remember ACTA?

As ever, the problem persists of national governments hiding behind the EU - using it as an excuse or a way to pass policies where the public aren't watching, when it is simply a system whose strings they are pulling.

Consider the controversial ACTA treaty. ACTA, which was intended to ensure an international 'harmonisation' of copyright enforcement, was criticised as potentially allowing private companies to violate basic personal liberties like privacy and even threatening generic medicines to protect the financial interests big pharmaceutical companies.

While many national governments around the world and across Europe signed, including the UK, the treaty was ultimately blocked in a vote by the directly and proportionally elected EU Parliament, following massive public protests across the EU.

III: What is the point of free trade?

On TTIP, Prime Minister Cameron has tried to make out that there are stark lines over the deal. From his perspective, on his side - supporting TTIP - are all those who want free trade and the benefits it brings, and on the other are people who are 'against free trade and wanting to see an expansion of trade and investment and jobs' (Mason, 2016).

It is not unfair to suggest free trade is a worthy principle, but why can't we have it on ethical terms?

In its more idealistic form, the EU is all about constructing an ethical free trade area. In its origins, it was conceived of as a way to end war in Europe by stopping national governments getting into strife with each other over control of the natural resources with which to construct to materiel of war.

Going further back, into the 19th century, the campaign for free trade was about breaking open cartels. Under the system of trade formed by the competing systems of national protection, the basic necessities were made prohibitively expensive by the stranglehold over them of powerful and unaccountable landlords and bosses whose interests where served by national government protection.

The Anti-Corn Law League, the early radical liberal campaign in the UK for free trade, sought to break up these cartels to reduce the cost of basic food and goods, so that the poorest could afford a decent and healthy life. The campaign for free trade was in service to the public against the protected interests of the rich landowners.

IV: What does EU trade look like?

What the EU has attempted, but not completed, is to ensure that the free trade it promotes takes place on a fair and ethical playing field. Basic standards, enforced by regulation (the mythical beast the Right love to talk of slaying), protect workers' rights, prevent animal testing and in a host of other important areas ensure a basic minimum expected of business practice in Europe.

Internally, this comes hand-in-hand with policies like the Regional Development Fund. The fund is intended to invest in the poorest, sub-national, regions of the EU to raise the standard of living up, so no country can look to undercut another on basic standards or be cut out left unfairly behind.

Externally the protections, of standards and rights, require trading partners to meet certain conditions for access to Europe's common market - like those of Norway and Switzerland that have been much publicised as alternatives in for the UK during this EU referendum campaign.

All of these ideals depend, however, on who is in charge of policy and negotiation at the EU. Right now, it is the conservatives of many EU member states who are in the ascendency and control policy and decision making at the European level. As a result, the EU's actions have been tinged with conservatism.

Within that system, it has been the Right, and the far right, who have been the ones pushing most aggressively for the UK to do away with the EU's standards - though it has faced resistance. The solution for the Right has become doing away with the EU, but keeping the market intact, as they still want to trade with Europe, but want to be undercut everyone else and help big business pad its profits by doing away with concern for the environment or workers' rights.

What do progressives want from trade?

Exiting the EU will require new trade deals to be negotiated. The conservative Right is unlikely to make those standards and regulations any kind of priority in its negotiations. Maybe, of course, those who want a 'left exit', unrestricted by the European system, will get a government of the Left before too long, to set about forming a new progressive trade policy.

But what are progressives in Britain going to negotiate for, if not an ethical trade area? An ethical trade area underscored by democratic accountability and cooperation?

Even a progressive exit would mean the dismantling of systems of cooperation, decades in the making, that have supported advances in rights, in a move that could only make the Far Right happy - only to have to then try to rebuild it all over again.

Right now for progressives, fighting corporate power and ensuring trade is conducted ethically and with appropriate standards and rights protections, remaining in the EU - not idly, but campaigning for progressive, democratic reforms - is still the best option.

This is Part 2 of  a multi-part series, "The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum" - click here to go to the introductory hub