What will happen to trade when we exit?

I can’t help feeling that if leaving the EU was a good idea, the Government would have been able to come up with an agreed policy before now. The policy recently agreed at Chequers is the first time the government has made a concrete proposal on the subject. And it led to resignations by the hardest Brexiters. I have been puzzled and frustrated by the fact that the hard Brexiters have not wanted to be specific about how Brexit will work in practice. They do sometimes claim that it will make goods cheaper and I now finally understood why. According to the Brexiters’ guru, Professor Patrick Minford, the goal of a hard Brexit is to have no import tariffs, no regulations and open free trade with the world. The claim is that removing tariffs will cut food prices by 20 per cent and removing regulations another 20 per cent. And they herald the USA as the main country with which we will agree such benefits. So would unregulated trade with the USA be more beneficial than the regulated trade we share with our fellow EU members? President Trump’s recent actions show us why it would not. Far from reducing existing, agreed import tariffs with his erstwhile allies, Mr Trump has unilaterally increased them, sparking retaliatory increases in return. This is already increasing prices as well as creating great uncertainty for employees in the industries affected both in the USA and abroad. On his recent visit to the UK, Mr Trump advised our Prime Minister to sue the EU. The USA is an unequal partner in all its relationships and if it chooses to be a bully, there is little that small individual countries like the UK can do to resist, especially against random law suits. The “regulations” that Mr Trump wants the Brexiters to remove encompass all the rules that protect producers, consumers and employees from unfair competition and unsafe products. We would all be at risk without them. The rules-based system we have with the EU and which the EU has with its trading partners ensures that the rules are clear and that well-established adjudication bodies exist to quickly and fairly resolve any dispute that arises. To suggest that there is any benefit in taking ourselves out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in order to subject ourselves to random law suits by an unpredictable US president is madness. Roger Chapman Purlewent Drive Bath