Ross Clark
many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, whose rapidly-expanding middle classes are prize targets for British exporters. The EU has failed miserably to do deals with China, India, Japan and Brazil. Its attempt to forge an agreement with the US collapsed last autumn. It has no deals with many Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria and Sri Lanka – nations with whom Britain was happily trading with openly before we joined what was then the Common Market in 1973.
Yet there are plenty of other countries which have successfully negotiated trade agreements with the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies. Switzerland has had agreements with Canada and Japan since 2009 and with China since 2014. The world’s most successful country in opening up trade is Chile. It has had deals with the US since 2004, China since 2006 and with India and Japan since 2007.
But it isn’t just a question of the numbers of free trade agreements. What really matters is how useful they are to British exporters. The trouble with many free trade agreements negotiated by the EU is that they try to balance the interests of 28 member states. They do not necessarily concentrate
CIVITAS then looked at 14 trade agreements which Switzerland has enacted with non-EU countries. In nine the rate of growth in exports grew – in seven cases it more than doubled. Only in five cases did the rate of growth in exports fall.
The reason why Switzerland’s free trade agreements have been of greater benefit to that country than the EU’s deals have been to Britain is that they were simple, bilateral deals which concentrated on areas of greatest benefit to both parties.
Post-Brexit we will take the same approach. We will be able to open our food markets to producers from outside the EU – markets which are currently subject to tariffs of up to 100 per cent, designed to protect French and Italian farmers when the EU was formed in the 1950s. In return we will be able to negotiate far better terms for exporting goods and services in which we excel.
Remainers love to try to paint post-Brexit Britain as a smallminded, inward-looking country. But the opposite is more likely: we will stand out as a beacon for free trade and crossborder investment. For Britain freer trade with the rest of the world will be a far more powerful engine for wealth generation than has been our membership of the EU.
‘EU is looking like a protectionist bloc’