So there is nothing new about a global world. We were living in one 2,000 years ago:
The Roman man in the street ate bread baked with wheat grown in North Africa or Egypt, and fish that had been caught and dried near Gibraltar. He cooked with North African oil in pots and pans of copper mined in Spain, ate off dishes fired in French kilns, drank wine from Spain or France.
The Roman of wealth dressed in garments of wool from Miletus or linen from Egypt; his wife wore silks from China, adorned herself with diamonds and pearls from India, and made up with cosmetics from South Arabia… He lived in a house whose walls were covered with coloured marble veneer quarried in Asia Minor; his furniture was of Indian ebony or teak inlaid with African ivory.
Tacitus traces the history of this monstrous growth of laws (which Julius Caesar had tried to trim back), adding with his usual pithy brilliance ‘corruptissima republica, plurimae leges’ (‘when the state was at its most corrupt, laws were most numerous’).
And what does that remind you of ?
While on laws – Edward Gibbon wrote ‘ a Locrian who proposed any new law stood in front of the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck: if the law was accepted, his life was spared. If the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.’
Might that concentrate minds at Westminster – or rather Strasbourg ?