Yes @DKShrewsbury : UK’s share of trade with EU is decreasing; but no that doesn’t mean UK is best off outside EU - exact opposite: UK needs to access huge global markets so it needs the negotiating might of the world’s largest trade bloc (EU) now more than ever.
@AndrewCastle63
@AndrewCastle63
Why do so few get that the EU trade project isn’t just about people ‘inside’ the EU having access to each other’s market of 450million, but also joining forces to forge a negotiating powerhouse that can gain ‘way’ more access to global markets than smaller countries.
As Michael Plouffe at @uclspp points out, UK decrease in trade power outside the EU is highlighted by the fact US is already taking a tough line in US-UK trade ‘chats’ - because it can: the UK’s 66m people & US$3 trillion GDP is dwarfed by EU’s 500m people & US$20 trillion GDP.
Yes, yes, the UK has whipped off dozens of small trade deals with non-EU countries since we left the EU. But they’re not the sort of broad, all-encompassing, access trade deals with huge markets the EU can negotiate. The UK has ‘never’ done one of these alone, outside the EU.
As @simonjenkins4 warned earlier this year “The UK is about to lose the muscle of EU collective negotiation. Any marginal rise in trade with China or the US will be strictly on their terms. As Johnson would say, it will be vassalage”.
As one diplomat & EU trade expert put it to me, off the record, before we’d even left: “The Americans will have the UK over a barrel” when USA-UK trade negotiations start.
Sigh. End of thread.
Sigh. End of thread.
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