May’s great hope for Australia deal
THERESA MAY is to open talks on a landmark new free trade deal with Australia, as she declares Britain will lead the world in global commerce outside the EU.
The Prime Minister will meet her Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, at the G20 summit in China tomorrow to shape the broad outline of what would be Britain’s first new trade pact after Brexit.
She is expected to explore further trade opportunities in talks with Barack Obama, the US president and Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, during the two-day gathering of world leaders. She will also meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, for the first time and will attempt to soothe relations with her hosts, which were damaged after her decision to pause the Chinese-backed Hinkley Point nuclear plant project.
Yesterday, Mrs May insisted it was “a golden era for UK-China relations”, echoing the choreographed rhetoric from Mr Xi’s state visit to Britain last year.
Mrs May’s efforts to make Britain a “great trading nation” received a further boost with news that Australia, New Zealand and Canada will lend the Government their own trade negotiators. At present, the UK has a desperate shortage of officials who are trained in negotiating trade agreements because all such deals affecting Britain have been drafted centrally in Brussels for decades.
These specialist negotiators will be critical to Britain’s hopes of striking a good exit deal from the EU, as well as forging fresh trade pacts around the world.
Speaking ahead of the summit – her first major appearance on the world stage – Mrs May said the talks with Australia showed Britain was “open for business”.
She added: “As a bold, confident, outward-looking country,
we’ll be playing a key role on the world stage. I’ll be talking to other world leaders about the opportunities for trade around the globe that will open up for Britain following Brexit.
“My ambition for Britain is that we should be a global leader in free trade.”
Mrs May also used her first major broadcast interview since becoming Prime Minister to rule out a snap general election before 2020.
In the interview, to be broadcast on BBC One today, she warned that Britain faced “difficult times” ahead. The Prime Minister insisted that controls on migration from the EU would be a vital part of her exit deal with Brussels.
David Davis, the new Brexit Secretary, will make a statement to MPs this week outlining the Government’s emerging position on the terms of withdrawal, she added.
Mrs May’s visit to China is her biggest international test since entering Downing Street in July. She hopes to use the gathering to reassure world leaders that Britain will still be a “dependable” partner for business after Brexit.
During the summit, she will hold her first face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin, an occasion regarded as a critical test of nerve for a new leader.
At a discussion on the world economy today, Mrs May will champion Britain’s credentials as a trading nation and set out her vision of the future. The Prime Minister said: “We are going to make a success of Brexit and one way we will do that is by playing to Britain’s strengths as a great trading nation and forging our own new trade deals around the world.”
Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, has already spoken to his Australian counterpart, Steven Ciobo, and the pair will meet in London for further exploratory talks this week.
Mr Ciobo told The Sunday Telegraph he would be happy to lend Britain trade negotiators. British officials will hold talks in Canberra this week with their Australian counterparts about establishing a trade negotiating team. New Zealand and Canada have also offered the Government their expertise. Mrs May is being accompanied in China by Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, and Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England.
Also with her is her chief of staff, Nick Timothy, whose highly critical comments about plans for Chinese investment in the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant preceded Mrs May’s controversial decision to halt the project.
In an article before he took up his new post, Mr Timothy said MI5 believed China was working against British interests, and raised serious security concerns about Chinese involvement in the £18 billion Hinkley project.
However, the Prime Minister insisted: “This is a golden era for UK-China relations and one of the things I’ll be doing at the G20 is obviously talking to Prexident Xi about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have.”
She will hold her first meetings with Mr Xi tomorrow, but she is not expected to offer him any assurances that the Hinkley deal will go ahead.
She told the BBC she was still looking at the evidence and listening to advice on whether to proceed.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, used a visit to Poland to stress that Britain was leaving the EU but not “leaving Europe”, giving as an example the fact that “the UK has been at the forefront of bolstering Nato defences in Eastern Europe”.