Trade agreements post Brexit will be better for Britain
NOTHING encapsulates better the bullying, anti-democratic culture of the EU than its leaders trying to tell us we can’t start trade talks with any country until we have formally left the EU. They are behaving like a spurned school child telling a classmate: “If you’re not going to be my best friend you’re not going to be anyone’s friend.”
Yesterday International Trade Secretary Liam Fox hinted that the Government is treating the EU’s efforts to thwart our future relations with the rest of the world with the respect they deserve. Fox’s department has already set up working groups with 15 countries to discuss trade deals which could come into effect when finally we have left the EU in two years’ time.
It isn’t hard to see why the EU is so desperate to stop us even talking to other countries: it is terrified that Britain might soon have more open trading relations with the outside world than does the EU.
It wouldn’t be difficult. While the Remain lobby keeps trying to tell us that our exporters desperately need the EU, evidence points very much in the other direction. The EU has its single market, true, but its efforts to open up trade with the rest of the world have been pathetic. Europe is looking more and more like a protectionist bloc which is spurning opportunities to do business with economies that are far more dynamic than its own.
THE EU boasts of having made free trade agreements with more than 50 countries. That sounds impressive – until you look at the list. Three of them are Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. As for Akrotiri and Dhekelia I was wondering why I had never heard of these “countries” until I realised they are British bases on Cyprus. No, we don’t need the EU to help us export goods to our own sovereign territory.
Many of the other countries have pretty marginal economies. I don’t want to pooh-pooh the opportunities to do business with San Marino, Andorra and Moldova but I can’t help thinking that trade deals with the US, China and India might just be a little more useful to British exporters.
Just look at what is missing from the list of EU trade deals: