One of the things I talked about in my new book was about the EU itself evolving. I am not sure how many people have cottoned onto the fact that it has many more trade deals than it did in 2016? Its new deals reached in the last 3 years cover around 500,000,000 consumers.
But that means when we're trying to size up the problem of replacing our trade deals via the EU (i.e. with those we have with other countries, by virtue of our EU membership) the task is getting harder by the day. We're running out of places the EU hasn't already done deals with.
Of course there are some big omissions: USA, China, India & so on. But in every case, the EU has been negotiating for years or decades already. So the idea that little old us will waltz over and get a comprehensive deal when the massive EU has failed so far is absolutely absurd.
And even in cases where they don't have a full deal in place yet, they often have facilitation arrangements covering specific aspects of trade. The EU's got over 200 of those with the US, for example. (We won't have any.)
