Freeports are a gimmick that betrays the weakness of the Budget

Supposedly free-market policy ideas have been around for decades without getting any better, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak promote a freeport in a post-Budget visit to Teesport (AP)

When I started as a political journalist 38 years ago, on the New Statesman in 1983, freeports were an exciting new idea among the free-market think tanks that were enjoying their moment in the sun under Margaret Thatcher.

The New Statesman was interested in the ideas of the new right, and I found Madsen Pirie, who set up the Adam Smith Institute just before Thatcher came to power, a lively and intriguing exponent of them.

One of his ideas was freeports. This was so long ago that his pamphlet Freeports is now a collector’s item. A copy in “very good” condition (“never been read”!) was on eBay for £60 last month. The idea was that ports around Britain should have taxes and regulations abolished, so that they could become hubs of international trade like the city-states of old, Hong Kong and Singapore.