Indeed, just made a similar point on Radio 4 (#humblebrag), trade deals may not be significant to the economy as a whole, but for individual products they can be the difference between domestic production disappearing, stable, or growing strongly.
Usually food - check out banana wars, chicken tax, citrus black spot, feta cheese just for starters. Textiles can be quite sensitive - bra wars. Then the obscure, broom makers in NAFTA. Or even a story today about a milk product... politico.eu/interactive/th…
And then ask, so what should UK priorities be in trade deals? Is it food and drink products, if so which ones (Scotch? Cheese?). Is it cars, or ceramics, or should we focus on services? All have supporters, lobbying intensively. But we don't know which will win. And lose.
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What you seem unlikely to read elsewhere - yesterday's Starmer - von der Leyen meeting was successful, and had the right outcome - a commitment to regular ongoing summits, and joint working to prepare them.
To those complaining about the UK's lack of detail - a lazy, uninformed complaint. The EU doesn't (yet) have a mandate, the UK doesn't (yet) need to have all the asks. Both need to come in time. That will be the test of the next few months, now was not the time. As was agreed.
Those saying this is going nowhere until the UK implements everything in full, that message was received and @NickTorfaen explicitly said this at an EU reception at Labour Conference. Labour's messaging hasn't been perfect to date, it has though been good enough.
Three days in Brussels mostly talking UK-EU relations after the elections with various folk on all sides, but also hard to get away from US-EU-China talk, or concerns about the direction of travel for the EU. So what were my top 10 findings? Settle down for a thread 🧵
1 - though far from top priority, the EU will happily engage with the UK. There's interest in what a new government will do. But they also expect their own interests - recently youth mobility, and fishing - to be taken seriously. Where there's overlap - security - expect progress
2 - the UK has to prepare for a really tough ongoing engagement with the EU. This will not be a single negotiation but a series of small encounters, mini-deals, cooperations etc. Unless Labour red lines change. A new narrative for the relationship - but only in part.
Like it or not, we are stuck for a while in the technocratic realities of international relations when it comes to UK-EU relations. I'd expect there to be a time when that changes, when there's a rejuvenated campaign for rejoining, but not for a while.
Why are the technocratic realities of international relations not a hot topic in the General Election?
Asked nobody, for good reason. Not that UK-EU relations won't be important to various policy issues. But hardly top-ticket politics.
Today's big trade news - that the EU will apply additional tariffs of around 25% on Chinese made Electric Vehicles, on the basis that they have benefitted from illegal subsidies. This comes as a result of furious lobbying for higher or lower figures. ft.com/content/0545ed…
The US has imposed higher Chinese EV tariffs, without specific justification, and it was suggested 50% was needed in the EU to remove cost advantage. But some or more of this is natural competitive advantage from far earlier investment. The EU was looking as ever for a balance.
My suspicion has long been that China was broadly aware that politically the EU had to act, and that a 15-20% tariff on EV they were prepared to bear though with some retaliation because that's what happens in such cases. The furious lobbying came against much higher figures.
In we go... and just a few pages in, the relief is that there are none of the obvious errors than so often undermine UK accounts of Brexit - at likely cost to the sanity of @ShippersUnbound he appears on top of the subject...
Next UK negotiator perhaps...?
10 pages in and the level of haplessness described within the UK government system with regard to negotiations in 2017 is off the scale. I know we've improved since then. But equally, I doubt enough lessons have been learnt.
60 pages of systemic failure. There are probably many lessons to learn, but the two most obvious would be, listen to people who understand the EU, and know your objectives. Are either widely acknowledged in the UK as yet?
Increasingly thinking that Labour is going to need some clever way to handle the EU issue otherwise there is going to be a lot of difficulty and frustration spilling into government. And judging by my inbox, affecting negotiations. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Problem with these "we can't talk about it but we always talk about it" issues is that they don't go away, and particularly when they involve international talks with a player like the EU, you simply add levels of complexity potentially making it unmanageable.
Worse with UK-EU is the sheer number of players and subjects involved, and that both sides have unfinished emotional business. More on the EU side to come, but the fact every UK story generates reaction tells you this isn't all forgotten...