Trade humbug

The Brown trip to China has been a rum old thing - it certainly isn't operatic material. One thing that's notable is the absence of the usual umm-ing and ah-ing over China's human rights record, or rather lack of it. Nick Robinson has a bit of a whinge about how things seem to have gone backwards, not forwards, but that's OK because the BBC's already banned from China.

Brown, on the other hand, seems to have decided not to make a stage-managed statement on human rights for the newspapers back home. The media at the press conference went along with this, pointedly asking Premier Wen all the tricky questions about democracy and avoiding asking Brown why he was doing business with this bunch of totalitarian dunderheads.

But Westmonster has a question: what exactly is this new trade agreement China and the UK have signed? As far as we can see, it just says the Vice Premier of China and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will meet "regularly" to discuss trade, and sets some targets for where we'd all like trade to be.

Now, given that no premier in the world (apart from a few loons like Chavez) would ever willingly suggest that a decline in trade with another country is a good thing, or that fewer high-level meetings between senior politicians might be a wizard plan, this seems asinine in the extreme. Did we really fly Sir Richard Branson all the way to China just to propose a couple of targets which, if they were put forward by a headteacher in a primary school, would lead to an immediate telling off by the regulator? Just asking.