As trade ministers gathered in Yaoundé last week for the WTO’s fourteenth Ministerial Conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the multilateral trading system, Britain’s Trade Minister Chris Bryant shared some early tough love at Chatham House, saying that the real danger for the UK when it comes to trade is ‘somnambulism.’ He pointed out that drawing up a mandate for a new free trade agreement takes a full twelve months before negotiations even begin, and those drag on for years. He made a case for reforming the WTO and for enhancing international trade. He is right, yet his own government has been slow when it comes to ‘walking the walk.’
The multilateral trading system formalised by the WTO’s founding in 1995 delivered the largest sustained liberalisation of trade in modern history at its time. That achievement should not be taken for granted, as it would be a tough sell in today’s climate. As Bryant himself put it: one generation believes in free trade, the next assumes it and the third forgets it. Between 2015 and 2023, protectionist measures worldwide more than quadrupled.
Some countries are now even trying to push below this multilaterally established ‘floor,’ the prime example being the American assault on the most-favoured-nation principle. The US produced a reform paper last December arguing that MFN impedes liberalisation. The real motive, as Alan Beattie noted in the FT, is that Washington cannot get proper trade agreements through Congress and wants to legitimise ad hoc ‘gunboat deals.’ More troubling still, the EU appears willing to entertain the argument. Commissioner Šefčovič has gone as far as to suggest that MFN as a principle is ‘not sacred’.
Britain should not follow this path. As the minister himself noted, a British car contains components from dozens of countries. An Airbus is 30 per cent British. According to the World Bank, the UK was the fourth largest exporter of goods and services in the world in 2024, and the fifth largest importer. British consumers and firms depend on that openness. Imports keep prices down, widen choice and supply the intermediate goods that manufacturers need to compete abroad. An economy this embedded in global supply chains benefits enormously from a principle that guarantees predictable market access. Undermining MFN is a losing strategy.
The WTO deserves serious reform, but reform is difficult because the institution is designed to be slow. Decision-making operates by consensus, giving any single member an effective veto. The Doha Round, launched in 2001, was never concluded. The Appellate Body has been frozen since 2019. When the Government Procurement Agreement committee needed a new chair, Hong Kong blocked the appointment of a Taiwanese candidate on transparently political grounds, leaving the position vacant for years.
None of this means the WTO should be abandoned. It means we should stop expecting it to be the engine of liberalisation and understand it instead as a guardrail. If the WTO sets the floor, bilateral and plurilateral agreements are where countries actually innovate. The UK-Australia FTA, which entered into force in May 2023, eliminated tariffs on over 99 per cent of Australian goods exports. Its chapters cover digital trade, procurement access beyond WTO levels and financial services commitments that exceed even the CPTPP.
The CPTPP itself is a great example of innovation when it comes to trade agreements. Its e-commerce chapter has become the template for digital trade rules in the region and beyond, whilst WTO negotiations on e-commerce remain stuck. Even the EU-Australia deal, expected to be signed this week after nearly eight years of talks provides some decent outcomes on critical minerals and procurement, but the pace is slow.
To make things confusing, in the same week the Trade Secretary championed free trade at Chatham House, his department announced a steel strategy. From July 2026, import quotas will be cut by 60 per cent and out-of-quota tariffs will rise to 50 per cent. The government is also launching a WTO process to raise bound MFN steel tariffs permanently.
The construction industry already expects higher project costs at precisely the moment the government wants to build 1.5 million homes. There is a more market-friendly alternative: boost demand rather than restrict supply. Liberalising planning, permitting faster building of housing and infrastructure would grow the domestic market for steel without taxing every firm that uses it.
The Trade Secretary is right that somnambulism, in the sense that following the lead of bureaucracies that operate at glacial speed and have few incentives to evolve, is a real danger. The WTO is too slow to drive the next wave of liberalisation, or even to preserve the status quo, from the looks of it. Bilateral deals are where the action is. Britain should be concluding more of them, faster, while defending the MFN floor and choosing to protect consumers rather than giving hand-outs to favoured industries at the expense of everyone else.
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