Leadership Quote by Peter Mandelson

A careful certainty is doing the heavy lifting here. “I certainly believe” sounds personal and almost modest, but it’s also a political shield: the claim is framed as conviction rather than an empirically contestable promise. Mandelson isn’t selling a technical policy so much as projecting steadiness in a debate where every statistic can be weaponized.

The phrasing of “we gain” is deliberately roomy. It invites the listener to imagine higher growth, lower prices, new opportunities, and national dynamism without specifying who, exactly, is included in “we.” That ambiguity is the subtextual bargain of pro-globalization rhetoric: diffuse benefits are spoken in warm, collective terms; concentrated costs are treated as transitional noise. “Open trade and liberalisation” then arrives as a matched pair, almost a mantra, linking cross-border commerce with domestic deregulation. It’s not just about tariffs; it’s about a whole model of the economy, smuggled in as common sense.

Context matters: Mandelson is a New Labour figure synonymous with Third Way pragmatism and a pro-EU, pro-market posture. This line reads like it’s addressed to two audiences at once: business leaders who want reassurance that Britain won’t go protectionist, and anxious voters who need to hear that openness is not naivete but strategy. The quote works because it sounds calm in a noisy argument, yet it also quietly narrows the range of “reasonable” disagreement. If you don’t “gain” through liberalisation, the implication goes, you’re not just opposing a policy - you’re resisting modernity.