What little manufacturing that the North and Midlands had held on to was expected to collapse as barriers to trade went up. Vengeful Remainers were especially looking forward to the comeuppance of Sunderland — the city that delivered the knock-out blow to Britain’s membership of the EU. Good luck holding on to your Nissan car plant, suckers!

But five years on and Nissan is still here and expanding. A billion pounds is being ploughed into the production of electric vehicles and the batteries are included — Nissan’s partner, Envision AESC, will be building a ‘gigafactory’ to produce them. Vauxhall, meanwhile, is investing a hundred million into its Ellesmere Port plant. The factory will produce electric vans — for which demand is soaring. And there are reports that the British Government is working with Tesla to find a UK site for a major manufacturing centre.

Whatever one thinks of Brexit, these are developments that everyone should welcome.

But Britain wouldn’t be Britain without its moaning minnies. And there are two sets of people who aren’t happy: firstly, the hardcore Remainers for whom any assertion of the British national interest is pure jingoism; and secondly, the free market fundamentalists for whom any government intervention in the economy is a slippery slope to the Seventies, if not downright communism. 

There’s a lot going on to raise their hackles. The Nissan and Vauxhall deals won’t have happened without the Government fronting-up a portion of the overall investment. Last week, the ministers moved to sweep away the EU rules on state aid that stand in the way of further state subsidies. Ministers also decided to keep the trade restrictions that help protect the UK steel industry from cheap imports. And then there’s the National Security and Investment Bill, which was introduced last year to protect British companies from “malicious” foreign investors. 

Meanwhile, Labour is trying to get in on the Government’s act: Keir Starmer has unveiled a Buy British plan to bolster companies through public procurement. 

Critics on both Left and Right see any turn towards “economic nationalism” as a bad thing. But does it have to be?

If you believe in a borderless world in which we have no special loyalty to our compatriots, then any kind of nationalism is bad. But if, like most people, you do believe in the nation state — and that a national government should put its own citizens first — then what is wrong with nationalism in the economic sphere?

The most obvious answer is that free trade is a good thing — and that Britain should not disrupt the level playing field of international competition. It’s a nice theory, but it ignores the fact that the playing field is anything but level. British industry is fighting an uphill battle, because our competitors have no qualms about tipping the terms of trade in their favour. Just look at export-led economies like Germany and China.

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Both of these countries benefit from rigged exchange rates. In Germany this is achieved through the single currency. If the Deutschmark were still around, you can bet that it would be trading at a much higher value against the Pound than the Euro does. This would make German exports a lot less competitive. As for China, it builds up enormous foreign currency reserves, while restricting access to its own currency. The result is a mismatch in demand that skews the exchange rate to the advantage of Chinese exporters.

There are other weapons in the armoury of the economic nationalist. For instance, EU figures show that, as a percentage of GDP, state aid to German industry is more than three times what it is Britain. Subsidy levels are also high in countries such as Hungary, Czechia and Poland — all of them key export markets and cheap labour suppliers for German industry. China subsidises its industries too — through direct support, access to low interest loans and crazy levels of infrastructure spending. It also protects its businesses from foreign competition while enjoying open access to western markets. 

So when the economic globalists talk about free trade, they don’t mean free trade at all. They mean that we should we leave ourselves wide open to the rampant economic nationalism of other countries. 

But so what? If these countries want to sell us their stuff at a knockdown price, then don’t we benefit? Let the Germans and Chinese do what they do best, while we concentrate on what we do best. That way we’ll all get richer. 

Except that we haven’t got richer. Not lately. The UK in particular has suffered from more than a decade of low growth. In terms of GDP per head we are bottom of the league of north European countries (a comparison that was gleefully seized upon by the SNP to make the case for Scottish independence). As for the rate of productivity improvement — on which all prosperity ultimately depends — we’re doing the worst out of the biggest western economies.

The free marketeers have got some explaining to do. This country has done more than most to follow their ideological prescriptions. We’ve thrown open our borders to the flow of goods, services, capital and labour. We’ve allowed foreign interests to buy up our companies and our property. Our public procurement policies emphasise value for money not buying British. For decades, we barely bothered with an industrial policy — and left business investment up to the private sector. And furthermore we’ve encouraged that investment with lower taxes and lighter regulation. 

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But let’s not just look at the British economy in the abstract. We must also count the human cost. A low-skill low-wage economy comes at a terrible price to pride and hope. That’s especially true when these patterns of work define entire communities and regions. We should, of course, be thankful that we have a job-creating economy, but quality matters as well as quantity. 

The fact is that a policy of economic disarmament — of leaving Britain undefended against the economic nationalism of our competitors — has only delivered prosperity and wellbeing to some of our people. And that is not enough. British voters are demanding more, which is why our Government has tentatively embarked upon a policy of economic rearmament. Above all, this means doing what it takes to build up industries that provide high quality jobs. 

The sceptics will argue that the British economy is perfectly capable of doing that already. For instance, Julian Jessop in the Telegraph holds up the example of the UK’s tech sector. Britain is now home to more than a hundred tech companies worth more $1 billion. This is “a larger number than the rest of the Europe combined”, he says. No need for continental-style industrial policies, then.

Except that key centres of innovation — like London’s Silicon Roundabout — have benefited greatly from government programmes. Public funds have been been ploughed into the capital’s infrastructure — and also into Britain’s world-beating universities. The achievements of our tech entrepreneurs should be celebrated, but their industry has been supplied by the state with the vital resources of connectivity and brainpower.

There’s no reason not to give other strategically-important industries what they need to succeed too. What some industries require may be more specialised than others but the principle is the same. If individual companies can’t bear all the costs and risks involved, then there’s a case for government shouldering some of the burden.

Since the public purse is not bottomless, funds should be deployed where they will make the most difference. However, unlike a private investor, government has the ability and the duty to consider more than just the financial bottom line. Above all, there is goal of providing satisfying, well-paid work not just in some places but throughout the nation. 

In the end, that is what economic nationalism comes down to: economics as if every Briton matters. 

The pandemic also illuminates a wider retreat from full-on free trade that has been gaining in support and legitimacy over recent years—everywhere, that is, apart from in the economics profession. Democratic politics and national social contracts are starting to assert themselves against the laws of comparative advantage — which in any case turn out not to be quite as benign as the economics professors claim. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I heard a very senior Tory say that he was, until recently, an orthodox free trader/free marketeer but now regarded himself as an economic nationalist.

He is not alone. World trade fell last year by 0.4%. There has been no multilateral trade agreement since 1993. Donald Trump wants to bring back some of the US supply chain from China. And this is not a Trumpian eccentricity, most of the US political class is behind him on this, acknowledging that allowing China entry to the global market economy in the belief that it would transform politically (and become less mercantilist economically) is a gamble that failed. There has been technological decoupling too, the world will not end up on single global platforms.

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The ascent of climate change anxieties up domestic and international agendas is also making life uncomfortable for unfettered free trade, encouraging a bias towards localism, reduced travel and a degree of self-sufficiency. China’s air quality has improved dramatically in the past few weeks as a result of measures to contain the coronavirus. And more generically, Greta is asking whether you really need strawberries in March.

The truth is that the neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold. Free trade, as Keynes pointed out, only works if the people displaced from good jobs by imports get equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. The election of Donald Trump is one kind of proof that this has not been happening.

Hold on, say the free traders, of course there will be downward pressure on wages and job losses in the short run but, in the long run, the additional purchasing power we acquire from cheaper imports means we can buy other goods and services that will create equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, they say, when given the choice between protecting the Mid-West manufacturing plant and enjoying good quality, cheaper stuff in Walmart, people have voted with their wallets for the cheaper stuff.

But they have not been given a proper choice. Of course people would always prefer cheaper goods, but not at any price. If the choice was between slightly more expensive goods and services, and the preservation, or more gradual decline, of a certain agricultural or industrial way of life, they might well support such a deal. Indeed, they do so in the EU through the Common Agricultural Policy.

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According to Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, most trade doesn’t follow any discernible pattern of comparative advantage, and Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin has shown that, for countries in North America and Western Europe, joining free trade agreements has caused slower — not faster — growth in recent decades. Unlike comparative advantage in natural resources, which is better described as absolute advantage, comparative advantage in manufacturing systems is usually quite marginal.

Much of the comparative advantage of recent decades has been achieved by simply taking advantage of lower labour costs in poorer countries. Apple makes iPhones in China, which does benefit US consumers, and to some extent Chinese workers, but the main beneficiaries are probably Apple executives and shareholders. Bringing some of that production back to the US, even at the cost of slightly higher prices, would not, I suspect, be unpopular.

The theory that free trade engenders a permanent peace has long ago been exposed as an empty dream, which is why national security and the threat of war (and pandemics) continue to provide justification for some degree of national protection. In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

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Nobody sensible is arguing for self-sufficiency or anything like it, though it might be a good idea to retain at least some national capacity in certain strategic areas like steel or nuclear power plants or, indeed, vaccine manufacture. And, after all, isn’t the logic of comparative advantage to produce specialist monocultures in a world that values diversity in all things.

But there are some economists and political economists such as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Barry Eichengreen and Robert Skidelsky who are arguing, persuasively, that we need more democratic caveats to free trade. Rodrik argues that where there is a national consensus about preserving some aspect of an economy or culture, for example French restrictions on Hollywood film imports, these should be allowed and not attract sanctions from international trade regulators.

A UK government that is serious about regional and industrial policy, and shifting more high value economic activity towards the North, is implicitly protectionist. It is not going to promote high-tech export industries in Hartlepool and then allow them to be wiped out by imports. It will protect with either subsidies or tariffs. It is true that free trade theory does allow some such protection under the title ‘infant industry protection’, which is far preferable to senile industry protection, but EU state aid policy is not friendly to either.

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The unlikely bedfellows of populism, environmentalism and technology are all pointing in the same direction — the reshoring of some forms of production, a bit more self-sufficiency, more teleconferencing with people in other countries rather than immigration, all in all a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of recent decades.

Free traders will, not unreasonably, point to the costs. It could mean a bit less growth, though neither the populists nor the greens will necessarily object. Global supply chains are, indeed, a force for peace and breaking them up could bring back inflationary pressures. It could also mean that the dramatic fall in poverty in poorer countries will slow or stop. So why not try to mitigate the costs of free trade better? Subsidise the losers more intelligently? Or, the free trade sceptic might reply, why not prevent there being so many losers in the first place?

As Barry Eichengreen says, the problem with the global economy is not a lack of openness, but a sense that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces”. And as Hans Kundnani put it in last week’s Observer: “it is time the UK Government adjusted its rhetoric and stopped its paeans of praise to free trade”. Part of the point of Brexit is to put politics before economics, democratic legitimacy before economic growth.

Of course, we still want lots of trade and sustainable growth but at less cost to other things that people hold dear. A new rhetoric is needed that combines an appropriate level of openness with a sense of national control. An economic nationalism that most liberals can feel comfortable with.

David Goodhart works at Policy Exchange, and is the author of The Road to Somewhere: The new Tribes Shaping British Politics.