The BNP would ensure the “protection of British companies from unfair foreign imports” (source).

The BNP believes that in order to rebuild our manufacturing base British industries need to be protected in a similar style to that employed by East Asian countries such as Japan or South Korea. In the past, such countries have used a variety of tactics including tariffs, quotas, special tax arrangements, cheap loans, and currency undervaluation. By limiting the number of imports and raising their prices, they believe they can give British companies a captive market.

Remember, the effect a BNP system of tariffs could cost us each an extra £1,300 a year.

The non financial effects of their protectionist measures are even worse:-

-          They reduce diversity and choice. Today, we can wear clothes made by Milanese designers, drink wine from the valleys of New Zealand, or use computers made in Tokyo to access websites designed by Indians in California. It’s difficult to put absolute numbers on the value of this, but  a recent fair estimate by Broda and Weinstein estimated the U.S. welfare gain from a greater variety of imports could be as much as much as 2.6% of GDP, or $1,000 each a year.

-          Quotas create rationing and waiting lists. As well as tariffs, another mainstay tool of protectionist policy are quotas. The BNP might not block the entry of the new iPad to Britain entirely, but you’d have to be in the lucky first 1,000 people on a waiting list to get one. More crucially, there would be these waiting lists for items in every area of our life – from pairs of jeans to the latest medicine.

-          They lose money from the British economy. While tariffs at least raise some money which could be used to cut taxes elsewhere, quotas don’t raise any money – at least for our government. What they do do is create an artificial scarcity which raises prices,  but that extra profit goes straight into the pocket of overseas producers.

-          They’d kick off a trade war. Once Britain unitarily imposed a system tariffs and quotas, it would not take long for other countries to respond in kind, or the WTO to chuck us out. British goods would be blocked from going overseas, leaving our manufacturing industry no better off than it was before and all of us worse off.

-          They’d inspire corruption. The inevitable result of rationing is black markets being formed. Decent, honest Britons would lose out, while the corrupt and wealthy paid through the nose to to keep on their old lives.

-          They take away consumer choice. In today’s economy, we as informed consumers increasingly expect to be in control. Rather than being what told to do by big government or by big corporations, we want to choose what we want and when. In the internet long tail age, our niche interests and tastes traverse the whole globe. We don’t want to wait six months after America for the latest Hollywood blockbuster or Sony gadget.

International trade and the variety of goods it brings make our daily life more vibrant and dynamic.  The BNP’s plan would return us to a dull, grey world, where we all consumed the same brands, wore the same clothes and drove the same cars. They’d increase the corruption and jealousy in British society as people fought to get their fair share. They’d take away our choice, limit our freedom and make Britain a more boring place to live.

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The BNP want to bring back all British industry back under British ownership (source) and raise new taxes on companies that make use of outsourced labour (source).

The BNP believe that foreigner companies and workers are a threat to the British economy, undercutting our wages and putting our workers out of job. Without foreign competition, the BNP believe, the white working classes would still have well paid, secure jobs.

It’s easy to blame foreigners for any problems with British economy, and the BNP are past masters at xenophobic scapegoating. Whenever British companies are bought or jobs outsourced, it’s easy to fall back on reactionary nostalgia, but the truth is that the outside world is far more an opportunity for Britain than a threat:

-          There isn’t a fixed number of jobs. It’s an economic fallacy to believe that there’s a set list of jobs in an economy, a zero sum game where every job gained is another lost. When technology removes one job in an economy, we (eventually) find something else useful for that person to do. We no longer need chimney sweepers in our economy, but that doesn’t mean there’s a load of unemployed chimney sweeps hanging around the job centre. Outsourcing is just another source of technology, a way of getting more done with less resources.

-          Outsourcing allows us to be more efficient. Outsourcing basic tasks allows us to focus on where our comparative advantage lies. The BNP understand that themselves: they could have hand coded a website for their party, but instead they used a standard Wordpress install (started by a Texan). Doing so allows them to spend more time on their comparative advantage, promulgating ludicrous nationalist propaganda.

-           Buying back foreign companies would bankrupt Britain. The BNP’s last general election manifesto claimed that “since we are not egalitarian socialists, it is not our intention to run around expropriating existing businesses”. But if we put this together with the idea that all “British industry [should be] back under British ownership” then it seems their only option is to buy out all the foreign investment in Britain. The cost of this would be enormous, easily in the hundreds of billions, and far beyond what the Treasury can afford.

-          A tax on outsourcing would send many companies bust. If the companies can’t afford to pay British wages, slapping an extra tax on them wouldn’t help. The end result is likely to either be their shutting down altogether, or moving the company headquarters to a different country, beyond where a BNP exchequer could reach them. The end result is that such a tax is likely to lose jobs as save them

-          A tax on outsourcing wouldn’t work. Neither is it clear what exactly the distinction between outsourcing labour and buying in a product from abroad is. Every time we buy any product or service from aboard, whether it be a car or a search engine, we’re making use of foreign labour. If company can’t outsource part of its operations, then it will simply split into two, and buy in what it used to do in house.

-          Foreign companies keep British competitive. The BNP are right to claim that in the real world free markets aren’t always perfectly competitive. Big companies don’t always offer as low prices or high quality as they could – but this problem only gets much, much worse when those same companies are protected behind trade barriers. Think of the old BT, when you had to wait months to get a phone line installed. The competition of international firms helps ensure that our domestic companies do what they should, and serve British consumers as well as they can.

-          Foreign companies spread new ideas. Upcoming countries such as India and China have benefitted enormously from the physical capital and institutions that Western companies have invested in their countries. But the same process exists in Britain too. We all benefit from picking up foreign expertise, ideas and innovations, learning from Germany efficiency or American risk taking. As the woeful performance of some British companies shows, we certainly don’t know it all yet. Foreign companies help to increase productivity, and in turn growth and our standard of living.

-          Foreign investment is a two way street. Although sales such as Cadbury’s make the news, for the last thirty years Britain has bought more foreign assets than have foreigners have bought ours. Companies as diverse as Tesco and BP have branches all over the world. These foreign investments have sent back profits and real wealth to the country.

-          The global marketplace gives us enormous opportunities. With China and India’s economies taking off, there are suddenly another two billion people present in the world economy. The BNP frames that as two billion rivals to the British workforce; it’s more helpful to think of it as two billion new customers the British workforce can sell to.

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