EU has no choice but to deal with us
THE Brexit negotiations, after months of waiting, have hardly even started and already millions of us are quietly saying to ourselves: “I don’t think I can take any more.” How many millions of pages are turned over as the technical details are expounded, how many TV channels switched? I shudder to think.
But in all this palaver about what horrors the EU negotiators can inflict on us if we refuse to dance to the music of Brussels, one startling figure is hardly mentioned: it is a stark and single fact that in the trade between this country and the other 27 there is a deficit to us of more than £70billion.
Put another way, there must be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of continental Europeans – producers, crop-growers, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, traders and businessmen – whose entire lives would be devastated if they lost the UK account.
But the mandarins of Brussels, bureaucrats who have never produced or sold a thing in their taxpayerfunded lives, do not seem to care. Well, they should.
If anything happened to disrupt, let alone devastate, that hugely profitable trade there would be suffering over here for a while but far more over there.
Take cars from one single country: Germany. Let’s take the big five: Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen and Porsche. They export vastly more cars to us than we send over there. But everything they make and send to us could also be supplied by Japan, South Korea, India, Malaysia and the USA. From superlux limos to cheap runabouts we could replace the lot if we wanted to. So be careful, Meine Herren.
The gap-toothed clown Verhofstadt can shout his head off but can he employ a million German craftsmen?
Five car-makers in one country are the tip of the trading iceberg. In the 44 years of British EU membership the global development picture has been revolutionised. Back then we turned our mercantile backs on the ever-loyal New Zealand, Australia, Canada. We curtailed the UK-USA link. China was still the sleeping giant, India vast but mired in poverty, Brazil an enormous jungle.
The image of New Zealand was a faraway sheep farm, Australia a huge cattle-droving Outback, Canada an endless wheat belt. It was industrially developed Europe that we needed to trade with – or so preached Edward Heath. Not any more.
IF a week in politics is a long time, half a century in industrial development is an eon. All the above are now manufacturing giants and the USA is the biggest of them all, avid for more trade with us.
Yet we do not have one-onone trade deals because we are not allowed to – by Brussels. But Brussels has been spectacularly unsuccessful in concluding collective deals with any of them, except with Canada.
Any trade war is damaging, sometimes ruinously so. It might be an idea for our ambassadors in those 27 other EU countries to have a sit-down with the local minister of trade and explain just how much their country profits from the UK export account.
Then those individual EU countries might instruct the Tusk/Juncker/Verhofstadt/ Barnier club of freeloaders in Brussels that though GB seriously wants trade with them to go on, there is one stark difference: we have alternatives, they do not.