EU member states don’t want to lose British business
FINALLY there seems to be some movement. EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier put up a typically stonewalling performance at a press conference on Thursday, claiming that Britain had not made enough concessions to justify talks moving on to trade. But it transpires that the governments of the 27 EU nations are, after all, preparing to discuss trading arrangements with Britain following Brexit.
For months, Barnier and his team have been trying to treat a post-Brexit trade deal as some kind of reward they will grant to Britain if and only if we agree to some outrageous “leaving bill”.
I know that for its own internal political reasons the EU doesn’t want to be seen as giving Britain a good deal but it always was a nonsense to behave as if trade is some kind of one-way process, more important to Britain than to the rest of the EU.
Trade deals happen because they are of mutual benefit between countries. They give good businesses the chance to expand and consumers access to the best possible choice of products. True, some industries suffer – those which are unable to compete in a global marketplace – but overall free trade offers huge net benefits to all sides.
MICHEL Barnier doesn’t want to admit this, and neither does Angela Merkel – who has hinted that she believes punishing Britain for Brexit to be a higher cause than preserving open trade. But there always was going to be a limit on how long EU export businesses were going to tolerate the EU’s attempts to block a trade deal with Britain. EU companies do, after all, export significantly more to us than we do to them.
Finally the moment seems to have arrived – EU governments, if not officials in Brussels, are beginning to realise that they will be damaging themselves if they continue to use a trade deal as a bargaining chip in order to extract billions of pounds from Britain.
Earlier this week the chamber of commerce in the Saarland region – one of the centres of the German car-making industry – reported that exports