UK must be willing to drop environmental standards to close trade deals, says leaked government email
The government should be willing to water down its environmental standards to persuade other countries to sign trade deals, according to a leaked email circulating around the Department for International Trade.
The letter, which was sent to around 120 civil servants across Whitehall this week, said the government should allow other countries to include products of “environmental concern” in trade deals if the issue could “compromise the wider agreement”.
The email was not seen by ministers and was sent to a working group of mandarins across a number of government departments.
The leak, which was released by Sky News, comes just two weeks before the United Nations’ Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Boris Johnson last month said Cop26 “is the turning point for humanity” and that a multilateral deal must be stuck to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees.
It comes after another leaked email to Sky last month revealed the UK dropped climate targets in the text of the Australian trade agreement to close a trade deal with Canberra.
The leaked Department for International Trade email read: “Her Majesty’s Government should not refuse to liberalise on products of environmental concern where there is an economic case for liberalisation or partner interest is so strong that not doing so would compromise the wider agreement.
“In these cases, we should continue to liberalise and address carbon leakage risk (in general, as well as any marginal additional risk from the FTA) using those FTA levers outlined in this note and non-FTA levers outlined elsewhere.”
A Department for International Trade spokesman said: “This is not government policy, and is not being considered by ministers.”
Shadow international trade secretary Emily Thornberry told Sky News that this kind of approach could lead to the government cutting trade deals with countries like Brazil where environmental standards are far worse than in the UK.
It will be very difficult for world leaders to get Brazil, under President Jair Bolsonaro, to sign up to any global agreement at Cop26 next month due to the government’s climate change skepticism.
Thornberry said: “It’s really shocking to see a document going around government where they’re essentially saying ‘never mind about climate change, never mind about the environment, Bolsonaro is a difficult guy, if we want to have a trade deal with Brazil and he wants to sell us stuff from the rainforest, we probably shouldn’t get in the way that much because we probably won’t end up with a trade deal’.”