The Bill for Globalism Has Arrived

And Everyone’s Pretending They Didn’t Order

The end of a very long dinner

Living in a cave in rural Spain gives you a peculiar seat from which to watch the world. On paper I’m the most global person for miles: born in Colchester into a service family, raised between Germany and Norway, twenty-six years in Hull, a career in RAF Police uniform, and now an Englishman living off-grid on a Spanish hillside with a small band of friends who share my fondness for living a long way from anyone’s opinion of us. If anyone should be waving the flag for the borderless world, it’s me. And yet from up here, over the last couple of years, I’ve watched that world quietly go round the house, locking all the doors.

It reminds me of the end of a long dinner with a big group. Everyone ordered with gusto, the wine flowed, somebody suggested the lobster, and nobody argued. Then the bill arrives, and suddenly the whole table is studying the ceiling, patting their pockets and remembering, with great conviction, that they only had the soup. That, as far as I can tell, is where we are with globalisation. The invoice has landed on the doormat, it’s considerably larger than anyone expected, and every political tribe on the planet is busy explaining that it was somebody else who ordered the lobster.

I want to be clear about what this piece is and isn’t. It isn’t a lament for the good old days of open borders, and it isn’t a cheer for the drawbridge. It’s an attempt to read the bill line by line, because I suspect that if we did, very few of us would come out of it looking clean… and that includes the bloke writing this from a country he wasn’t born in.

What we ordered

Cast your mind back to the menu we were handed in the 1990s. The Berlin Wall had come down, history had apparently ended, and a generation of politicians in very good suits told us that the future was frictionless. Goods would flow, capital would flow, people would flow, and a rising tide would lift every boat from Shanghai to Scunthorpe. China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, and the shelves of the West filled with things so cheap they felt like a magic trick. Budget airlines turned a weekend in Prague into something you booked on a whim after two pints. The phrase “global citizen” stopped sounding like a hippy slogan and started appearing on university prospectuses.

And, to be fair to the waiters, a lot of what was on that menu genuinely arrived. Hundreds of millions of people across Asia climbed out of grinding poverty in a single generation, which is the sort of thing historians will still be writing about when everyone currently shouting on social media is long forgotten. Phones got cheaper and better. Food got more interesting. Europeans could live, work and fall in love across borders their grandparents had fought over. I was one of the beneficiaries, and I’d be a liar and a hypocrite to pretend otherwise.

The small print, though, was in a font nobody bothered to read. The promise was never that everyone would win. The promise, if you squinted at the economics textbooks, was that the winners would win so much that they could compensate the losers and still come out ahead. It was a perfectly sound theory, rather like the theory that the person who ordered the lobster will cheerfully cover the cost of it. The trouble is that it relied on someone, somewhere, actually picking up that tab.

What actually turned up at the table

I spent twenty-six years in Hull, which means I learned about the global economy long before anyone called it that. Hull’s distant-water fishing fleet was gutted in the 1970s, not by a factory in Guangdong but by Iceland deciding, after the Cod Wars, that its fishing grounds were its own business. There’s a dark little joke in there that nobody in the current debate seems to have noticed: one of the first great British industrial wounds of the modern era was inflicted by another country closing its borders. The town learned early that when the world rearranges itself, it doesn’t send a letter first.

What followed across Britain’s older industrial towns was less a single shock than a long, slow bleed. By 2019, according to the Office for National Statistics figures cited by researchers at Sheffield Hallam, the UK employed just 2.7 million people in manufacturing, 7.7% of the workforce, in the country that invented the factory (Beatty and Fothergill, 2020). Those same researchers describe what they call the long shadow of job loss: towns where the work vanished, and a good chunk of the displaced quietly migrated onto incapacity benefits, which is a very polite statistical way of saying that a generation of men was parked and forgotten.

And here’s the line on the bill that nobody likes reading aloud. The compensation the economists promised never really came. The gains were real, but they pooled in London, in shareholder dividends, in the cheap holidays and cheaper televisions of people who were already doing fine. The losers were offered retraining schemes, regeneration quangos with optimistic logos, and the occasional ministerial visit in a hard hat. They were told, in effect, that they’d enjoyed the bread rolls and should stop complaining about the lobster. Is it really so surprising that, decades later, those same places started voting to lock the door?

The invoice, itemised

So here we are in 2026, and the bill is being read out loud. Tariffs, led by the United States for industrial and geopolitical reasons, have pushed average global tariffs up unevenly across sectors and partners, and the UN’s trade body expects governments to keep reaching for them as strategic weapons this year (UNCTAD, January 2026). In September, the World Trade Organisation warned that its rulebook was at a critical juncture after its 166 members failed to agree a reform package in Yaoundé. The share of world goods trade conducted on the old everyone-gets-the-same-terms basis has slipped to around 72%, from roughly 80% in 2022, and the WTO’s own economists reckon that a world carved into rival blocs would leave global GDP about 5% smaller by 2050, with the poorest countries taking the worst of it (Reuters via Engineering News, 15 September 2026).

Now for the line that made me laugh out loud, alone, in a cave. In the very same year everyone was declaring the end of globalisation, global trade grew by 7% and passed $35 trillion for the first time (UNCTAD via Engineering News, January 2026). We didn’t stop ordering. We just started complaining about the waiter while we ate.

Europe offers the same comedy in a different accent. Schengen, the great experiment in borderless living, now has internal checks running in a string of member states that were supposed to be temporary and have quietly become furniture. This summer the European Commission asked nine countries, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the Nordics, to start winding them down, pointing out that irregular crossings fell by 40% in the first four months of 2026 and that people in border regions are fed up with queuing to get to work (Riviera Radio, 2026). The recommendation isn’t binding, and the checks remain popular at home. I spent a career in security, and I can tell you that a visible barrier is often bought less for what it stops than for how it makes people feel. Reassurance is a legitimate thing for a government to provide. It’s just worth knowing which one you’re paying for.

Who had the lobster?

Start with the right, because they’re currently making the most noise about the bill. For thirty years the free-market wing of conservative politics was globalisation’s most enthusiastic customer. It cheered the offshoring, praised the flexibility of cheap labour, deregulated the City and told the North that the market would provide. Now a fair number of the same voices pose as the champions of the forgotten town, wagging a finger at the elites who sold it down the river, as though they’d been sitting at a different table entirely. It’s an impressive bit of theatre, rather like a man who ordered three courses and a brandy loudly demanding to know who’s been running up the tab.

The left doesn’t get off lightly either. It’s easy to forget that the original anti-globalisation movement wore Doc Martens and marched in Seattle, not in Make America Great Again caps. Somewhere along the line, much of the progressive world swapped its suspicion of global capital for a warm embrace of global everything, and started treating anyone who worried about wages or housing or the pace of change as a bigot to be lectured rather than a voter to be listened to. That wasn’t solidarity. It was snobbery wearing solidarity’s coat, and the people on the receiving end noticed.

Then there’s the rest of us, which is where it gets uncomfortable. A global Ipsos survey published this summer found that two-thirds of people believe those fleeing war or persecution should be able to take refuge in another country… and that almost half support closing their borders to refugees entirely (Ipsos, July 2026). The arithmetic tells you that a lot of people hold both views at once. We want the world’s produce on our shelves and the world’s carers in our hospitals, and we’d quite like the world itself to stay politely on the other side of the fence. I say “we” deliberately. Plenty of Brits living very comfortably in Spain have strong opinions about immigration back home, and if you can’t see the joke in that, I can’t help you.

In fairness to the restaurant

I promised to read the whole bill, so here’s the part that spoils a good rant. Blaming everything on “globalism” is often a way of letting our own governments off the hook. Britain’s manufacturing collapse was steepest in the early 1980s during a recession driven by a high exchange rate and high interest rates, which were domestic policy choices, and automation would have thinned the factory floor whatever the shipping lanes were doing (Beatty and Fothergill, 2020). Hull didn’t lose its trawlers to a container ship. Plenty of what we call the cost of openness was really the cost of governments that couldn’t be bothered to look after the places that paid it.

The defenders of an open world have a decent case, too, and it deserves better than a sneer. Services now make up around 27% of global trade and grew roughly 9% last year, and trade between developing countries has become one of the main engines of growth, which means the world economy is no longer simply something the West does to everyone else (UNCTAD via Engineering News). The WTO’s modelling suggests that better cooperation could add almost 3% to global GDP, with the least developed countries gaining the most. And public compassion hasn’t collapsed the way the headlines suggest: support for offering refuge in Japan has risen from 23% in 2019 to 64% in 2026, and in France from 43% to 68% (Ipsos).

So the honest position is messier than either tribe would like. Openness made the world richer and some places poorer. Closing the door may protect some of those places, or it may simply make everything more expensive and leave the poorest countries holding the heaviest share of the bill. Anyone who tells you this is simple is probably selling you something, usually a flag.

Nobody gets to leave

Here’s the snag with my dinner party metaphor, and I’ve been chewing on it for a while. At a real restaurant, you can split the bill, argue about the service charge, and storm out into the night swearing never to dine with these people again. The world doesn’t offer that option. There’s only one restaurant, we’re all still sitting in it, and the kitchen is still sending out plates whether we lock the front door or not. Climate, pandemics, energy, the minerals in the phone you’re reading this on… none of it stops at the border post, however smart the new uniforms look.

What I can’t shake, sitting up here off-grid, looking out across a country I wasn’t born in, is that the bill always gets paid in the end. It always has. The only question that ever really mattered was who’d be left holding it, and on the evidence so far, it’s the same people as last time: the ones who never got the lobster in the first place.

I don’t have a neat answer for you. I’m not sure there is one. But I’d quite like the people at the top of the table to stop studying the ceiling… and I suspect I’m not the only one waiting.

Until Next Time