THE NEW T R AD E ROUTE

The ITCU researchers were inspired by the early campaigns for free trade in Britain, in particular the Victorian campaigns against the Corn Laws and their relationship to the development of democratic culture amid the widening of the franchise. [...] A generation of politicians accepted that this was the price of European peace, and by the 1990s it would mean representation by the EU in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) whose creation the United Kingdom had led in the years after the war. [...] The text on Northern Ireland stated: “in the absence of agreed solutions, the United Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement”. [...] 26 The team at the IEA To its supporters, the UK’s departure from the European Union constituted the most important change in international relations since the fall of Soviet Communism as an opportunity to restore the fundamental principles of parliamentary democracy, including capacity to determine how to trade with the world and above all to self-govern. [...] The burglary targeted the offices of the authors of Plan A+ and the rest of ITCU and the Brexit Unit, and of Director General Mark Littlewood, on whose desk was placed a draft hard copy of the book, taken from the authors’ office.