Ross Clark

biggest economies in the world – while the EU has failed to do a deal with either.

The trouble with the TTIP is, like most things involving the EU, it is far too complex and megalomanic. What it should have done is concentrated on tariffs: taxes on imported goods. Had it done that a deal could have been struck relatively quickly. Instead negotiations proceeded straight into the harmonisation of things such as environmental regulations. It would have meant, for example, the EU having to retreat on some of the good things it has done, such as toughening up the rules on the use of chemicals which can cause environmental pollution.

The US has generally weaker regulations in this area and so inevitably American exporters were looking to loosen Europe’s tight standards.

Worse, the TTIP threatened to open a Pandora’s box of corporate lawsuits. Sensing an opportunity for US healthcare, utility and education firms to muscle their way into European markets, the Americans were very keen to include legal provisions whereby companies who felt excluded from foreign markets in public services could sue governments for compensation.

The Remain camp swore blind that it didn’t mean the NHS would be under threat of being opened up to US private healthcare providers – EU governments could continue to provide public health services. Yet if you are going to construct a legal framework allowing corporations to sue for what they see as lost business opportunities, opportunistic lawyers are going to use it to the full. Sooner or later a US healthcare firm would have a pop at the NHS.

So much for having more clout as being part of the EU, TTIP threatened to bring to Europe one of the very worst aspects of American life: a voracious legal industry. It isn’t hard to see who would come off the worse. It is rather easy to imagine US corporations steamrollering their way E don’t have to worry about TTIP very much now we are leaving the EU. In its place we should be looking for a straightforward agreement to lower tariffs between Britain and the US. It doesn’t matter if we don’t seal an over-arching deal in one go – what matters is that we make some progress on liberalising trade as it is a powerful engine of economic growth.

That is how Switzerland achieved trade deals with China and Japan: they concentrated on a few areas in which the country’s exporters were especially strong. They certainly didn’t agree to allow Chinese and Japanese corporations to sue Swiss cantons for failing to allow them to compete in the provision of public services.

In a decade from now, if there is an EU left at all, it will be an EU whose army of lawyers and officials are still trying to work out complex trade deals with the rest of the world while Britain enjoys a revival as the great trading nation it has always been.

To use Barack Obama’s analogy, we will have saved ourselves a huge amount of time by abandoning the queue for a self-service checkout.

‘Obama said we’d be at the back of the queue’