We should just trade on WTO terms

ACCORDING to Google’s news service on my smartphone, Michel Barnier has been writing to UK Opposition parties asking them to put pressure on our over-worked UK government to ask for a two-year extension to Brexit negotiations.

Now every nation’s trade is worth a lot less than it was in 2016, it is hardly worth protecting with an agreement, since the Office of National Statistics found that only 7.7% of UK GDP comes from EU goods exports, while Germany’s is 27.3%.

So we are far less dependent on EU trade than the rest of the EU.

It must be in our interests to commence trading on WTO terms on the 31st January 2021 with a totally clean sheet, especially if the EU insists on bureaucratic strings creating an uneven playing field the Scots and Welsh want for the UK, but not for themselves.

We haven’t had a deal with the USA since we joined the European Uneconomic Community, so it would be stupid to shackle ourselves to any other nation, especially one in danger of being ruled by a budding dictator like Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel.

When we have returned to manufacturing most of our own industrial components, perhaps we could revive “Commonwealth Preference” which Washington undermined when former “Dominions” where linking-up, not like terrestrial continents, but ocean corridors which, without air-travel, could slow the transmission of the next coronavirus to a manageable speed while using fewer gallons of kerosine per passenger mile.

Tony Maskell Newton Ferrers, Devon