India PM: Brexit is boost for trade deals
BREXIT will create ‘opportunities to increase trade’ with India, its prime minister said yesterday.
Narendra Modi used talks with Theresa May in Downing Street to flag up the opportunities for the UK to increase trade with the world’s second most populous country.
In separate talks linked to the Commonwealth summit, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau also told Mrs May he wanted to move quickly to a post-Brexit trade deal that would be ‘beneficial’ for both countries.
The UK and India have already launched a ‘joint trade review’ to examine opportunities for removing trade barriers in every sector of the economy.
During talks yesterday, Mr Modi and Mrs May discussed going further in order to ‘make it easier to do business in both countries and enable a stronger bilateral trade relationship for the future’. Downing Street said the Indian PM told Mrs May there would be ‘no dilution in the importance of the UK to India post-Brexit’.
A spokesman said that Mr Modi said the City of London was ‘of great importance to India and would remain so’.
He added: ‘The two leaders said trade between the UK and India had grown strongly over the last year and prime minister Modi said that Brexit offers opportunities to further increase trade ties.’ Trade with India is already worth more than £15billion a year.
Ministers believe there is vast scope for increasing this, if India can be persuaded to open its heavily restricted markets. But India is pushing hard in return for an increase in the number of visas granted to Indian nationals wanting to come and work in the UK.
Yesterday’s talks came on the margins of the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in London, which Mrs May hopes to use to boost trade with several countries.
DAVID Cameron last night insisted he still had no regrets about holding the Brexit referendum which ended his political career.
The former PM said he thought the vote was the ‘right thing to do’ and the British people deserved to be asked about how they were governed by Brussels.
He said he hoped that in future Britain would be a ‘good and friendly and close neighbour’ to the EU, rather than ‘a slightly reluctant and sometimes unhappy tenant’.