So much for EU’s trade deals with the United States
NOTHING signified the arrogance of the Remain campaign so much as when it wheeled out Barack Obama to deliver a speech warning that Britain would “be at the back of the queue” for a trade deal with the US if we voted for Brexit.
The subtext was: Britain is a piddly little country of no consequence to US trade while the EU is a substantial player .
It seemed a pretty absurd argument at the time. Britain has the second largest economy in the EU. Last year the US exported £56billion worth of goods alone to Britain. Far from losing out from leaving the EU it became clear at the weekend how much better off Britain could be making its own trade deals – something which we have been forbidden from doing ever since we joined the then Common Market in 1973.
Germany’s Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel admitted that the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP – have “de facto failed”. There have been 14 rounds of talks and yet the US and the EU have yet to agree on a single chapter of the 27 which make up the agreement.
In other words there has not been a great deal of point of being at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the US. It is like one of those queues at the supermarket where you get stuck behind someone with a full trolley, fiddling around with a wallet full of vouchers, when all you want is a tin of beans.
THE conceit of the Remain camp is that we have “greater clout” in negotiating trade deals with countries outside the EU. What they don’t like to point out is that stitching up any EU trade deal involves satisfying the competing demands of 28 countries.
We can’t just get on and concentrate on areas of business which matter especially to British exporters, such as cars, whisky, access to financial services markets. We have to wait while Spanish wine-producers and Hungarian goulash-makers make their case too.
That is why the EU has been so much slower in doing trade deals than have many countries outside the EU. Switzerland, for example, has managed to negotiate trade deals with China and Japan – two of the through courts in order to gain the right to run a hospital in Britain – it’s rather harder to imagine a British vehicle manufacturer using the courts to help win a contract to supply the US Army.
W