British foreign secretary evokes dark
period of French history as he warns
François Hollande against trying to hurt UK More news Topics Boris Johnson EU referendum and Brexit
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Boris Johnson speaks at a foreign policy conference in Delhi. Photograph: Sajjad Hussain/
AFP/Getty Images Michael Safi in Delhi Wednesday 18 January 2017 12.11 GMT Boris Johnson has warned François Hollande, the French president, against
trying to “administer punishment
beatings” in the manner of “some world war two movie” to any country that tries to leave the EU.
The foreign secretary evoked the
darkest period of France’s recent
history as he rejected comments by an adviser to Hollande who said Britain should not expect a better trading relationship outside Europe than it currently enjoys inside.
In an extraordinary outburst at a
foreign policy conference in Delhi, the UK’s chief diplomat said: “If [François] Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who seeks to escape [the EU], in the manner of some world war two movie, I don’t think that is the way forward. It’s not in the interests of our friends and
partners,” he said. There was no
immediate response from French
officials to the remarks.
At the conference, Jacques Audibert is understood to have said that Britain could not expect to get
a better deal outside the EU than that which it has at the moment – a position articulated by several European figures
including the prime minister of Malta, Joseph Muscat.
On Wednesday Muscat told the
European parliament: “We want a fair deal for the United Kingdom. But that deal necessarily needs to be inferior to membership.”
Hollande, who has not yet responded officially to Theresa May’s Brexit speech
on Wednesday, warned in October that Britain must pay a heavy price for leaving, declaring: “There must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price.”
Speaking on Wednesday Johnson saidbthat new tariff barriers between Britain and Europe would “cut both ways”, citing imports of German luxury cars into Britain.
It was “absolutely incredible”, he added, “that in the 21st century member states of the EU should be seriously contemplating the reintroduction of tariffs or whatever to administer punishment to the UK”. “[Britain] can put a
10% tariff on 820,000 cars,
Mercs. That’s a lot of money for the
exchequer,” he said. “We think we
can do a great free trade deal for the benefit of both sides.
The more trade, the more jobs on both sides.”
He added that it would be “foolish for the EU to seek to cut off its nose to spite its face by punishing the City of London
[because] those jobs won’t migrate to Paris or Frankfurt but to Singapore or Hong Kong or New York”. Johnson told the audience in the Indian capital it was “time to stick up for free trade”, arguing that Britain and India had enormous potential to boost their
economic ties, and suggesting the Indianngovernment start by relaxing its 150% tariff on imported whisky.
Scotch whisky accounts for around 4% of the Indian market, the largest market for the liquor in the world. “Now imagine we could just double that or treble that by removing those pesky tariffs, giving the Indian consumer more money to spend on other things,” he said.
“And, symmetrically, we could have
zero tariffs on wonderful Indian
products like those electric cars or buses or perhaps even bicycles that we’re now seeing on the streets of London.”
Such a deal could not be negotiated until Britain formally left the EU, he said, but could at least be “sketch[ed] out in pencil on the back of an envelope”.
“We may be leaving the EU, we may be taking back control of our borders, but that does not mean we want to haul up the drawbridge. We do not want to deter Indian talent from our country,”he said.
