The Trap

I picked up Jimmy’s paperback again recently, after hearing Senator J.D. Vance deliver a striking address at the Munich Security Conference. I’m glad I did. It reminded me of the same themes Vance touched on in his speech—values rooted in place, scepticism of global dogma—and the warnings Sir James Goldsmith set down nearly thirty years ago. This isn’t a comprehensive review, only a nudge: find a copy and read it.

Published in 1994, The Trap is Goldsmith’s blistering indictment of globalisation, free trade, and the drift toward centralised political power. He argued that exposing Western economies to low-wage competition would hollow out their industries, fracture their societies, and erode self-sufficiency. Three decades on, the evidence feels uncomfortably familiar. From shuttered factories to polarised politics, it’s hard to read The Trap without thinking that Goldsmith foresaw the script of our age—only no one stayed in their seat long enough to listen.

Goldsmith was a convinced localist. He believed that government should answer to the communities it serves, not to distant bureaucracies insulated from consequence. The European Union, in his view, embodied that danger: a system where authority accumulates in Brussels while accountability evaporates at home. Power, he insisted, should cascade downwards—from supranational bodies to nations, from nations to towns, from towns to people.

Beneath the polemic lies a practical conviction: economics must serve societies, not the other way round. Trade is not an unqualified good; it is only as moral as the conditions that underpin it. Agriculture, he wrote, is not merely an industry but a pillar of sovereignty—the ability of a nation to feed itself without permission. And sovereignty, for Goldsmith, was never isolationism. It was the freedom to decide, to err, and to recover under one’s own roof.

Main ideas

• Once nations surrender economic autonomy, the system reinforces dependence and limits the scope for recovery.
• Genuine democracy demands local accountability and the ability to dismiss those in charge.
• The European Union: an architecture of authority without corresponding consent.
• Economic theories that fail in practice have no moral or political worth.
• Trade openness should serve national stability, not undermine it.
• A nation that cannot feed itself cannot truly call itself sovereign.