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Jun 3, 2025  |  
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Daniel Hannan


Those on the Right should be taking credit for the India trade deal, not sniping at it

Let’s start with the big picture – big being the apt word, for India is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and about to overtake Germany to be third.

So far, India’s free trade agreements have been shallow and sparse. For the first six decades of its independence, India retained a Gandhian distrust of commerce. The wheel on its flag derives from a stylised handloom, like the one that Gandhi used to carry around as a symbol of economic self-reliance.

This is only the 16th trade deal that India has signed, and it is vastly more ambitious than the previous 15. 

Britain has pulled off something that no other country has, at least not on anything like the same scale. It has secured a comprehensive trade agreement with a teeming sub-continent that contains the world’s largest and fastest-growing consumer class.

We live in a polarised age, and people who dislike Labour are looking for reasons to oppose what it has agreed. They have found three pegs on which to hang their doubts: migration, taxation and uneven tariff reduction. All three are nonsense. But, before we come to that, let us consider some of the other gains.