, 7 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Important to know in Brexit debate (but elsewhere as well) that "Free Trade Agreement" is a marketing term and doesn't actually mean free trade. Rather it usually means preferential trade in terms of tariffs and other market access under a particular set of conditions.
All tariff preferences in "Free Trade Agreements" are conditional on rules of origin that mean you can't just rebadge someone else's goods and pass them off as your own. Negotiated badly this could mean no actual benefit for your exporters.
US and EU "Free Trade Agreements" have rather more stringent requirements in exchange for access to these huge markets - respect for intellectual property or acceptance of their rules on e.g. food.
These thoughts were sparked by a Spectator editorial last week on why a US trade deal would be a good thing - which essentially says free trade is good so a US FTA is good, and those who oppose it do so only because of the Brexit context spectator.co.uk/2019/08/trade-…
The article ignored the real issues with a US trade deal - that it may lead to higher barriers to trade with the EU and therefore overall, and of course that President Trump opposes free trade and is unlikely to want any more than token opening of the US market to UK exporters
A rather more substantial contribution on future UK trade policy was this LSE blog proposing an inclusive growth approach which is turn raises another big question - should the UK seek to follow EU and US leads in seeking to impose our rules on others... blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/08…
The UK has only really debated post-Brexit free trade and "Free Trade Agreements" in abstract to date. We don't have anything like a coherent approach as yet, which is what the whole UK-US-EU debate reveals. Brexit has unfortunately been too divisive and all consuming. /end
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