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
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.

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More from @Louise_Rowntree

13 Dec
In decades to come my children & grandchildren will want to know why Brexit happened and why it created the loss, waste, bureaucracy & damage it has ‘already’ started creating.
Here’s my pledge, as someone who was in Brussels then London:
I will remember it ‘all’.

#ShameOnYou
I will remember the allegations of blackmail ahead of the Brexit votes in the @HouseofCommons & @UKHouseofLords , and then the intimidatory ‘staring down’ by @theresa_may in the Lords.
I will remember how @theresa_may tried to sidestep our sovereign Parliament & ram through Brexit without MPs’ approval - only to have to be stopped by our Supreme Court. I’ll remember how our judges were then vilified and branded ‘traitors’.
Read 7 tweets
15 Aug
1/ My late father, Brian Rowntree’s (centre) letter home, from his ship #hmsindefatigable , about #VJDay
( #VJDay75 thread):
“Well, we have got a third and last surrender, after all that suspense. Censorship has been lifted this morning, so I can spread myself in this” Image
2/ “Rumours were driving us mental... on the morning the Japs threw in the towel, we were as usual at action stations & we had a strike out over Tokyo Bay. They came back, having knocked down six, and we cancelled our further planned strikes...
3/ “and the Commander broadcast & pointed out that the flagship was flying the signal ‘cease activities against Japan’. We all leaned over the rail and were goofing at the string of the bunting, when...
Read 7 tweets
22 Jul
Wow. @BorisJohnson in today’s #PMQs called @Keir_Starmer ‘s question about why Johnson sat on the #RussiaReport for so long, when it stated Russia was such an immediate threat, ‘absurd’.

Absurd.

#NotMyPM
Mike drop: when @BorisJohnson tries to avoid answering #RussiaReport questioning by saying @Keir_Starmer ’sat on his hands’ re Russia, Starmers replies that he was one of those involved in ‘prosecuting’ Russia in the #Litvinenko case.
“I spent 5yrs as Director of Public Prosecutions” says @Keir_Starmer (after @BorisJohnson suggests Starmer could have done more -in opposition-re Russia) “working on live operations with security services, so I’m not going to take lectures from this PM about national security’
Read 6 tweets
23 Feb
1/‘Why should EU nationals get priority over people from other countries -like America or India?’ People still ask.
Because they got it ‘in return’ for something: ‘our’ right of free movement to 27 other EU countries. Brexiters might not care, but this was a ‘huge’ bonus for us
2/ EU free movement meant I could pack my bags & go study in Paris, then return - a French & UK qualified lawyer - and work there. When I fancied a career/country change, I just moved to Brussels: €800 pm salary? Sure, no problem said Belgium. No ‘minimum’ salary’ requirements
3/ The freedom that EU free movement gave me changed my life, and what I could ‘give back’ to my UK. Apart from skills, and taxes, that includes a handsome Belgian husband who supports his UK family of five and happily pays £££ in taxes into UK coffers.
Read 8 tweets
26 Jan
Struggling to read @FTLifeArts piece by #LouisdeBernieres for its absurdity; the worst being “It was easier for continental Europeans to compromise on democracy because they do not have the advantage of being protected..as we are..by..being an island.

google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.ft.c…
@FTLifeArts Christ, he goes on about Germany’s role in WW1 & WW2 & concludes: “in view of what has happened twice in one century, is it unnatural that some people are wary of this?”. Perhaps if you’d worked with Germans in Brussels, as I have, you’d realise how absurd and offensive that is.
@FTLifeArts Next he opines that Schengen ‘may come to an end’ & EU free movement ‘may be lost’ because of Islamic terrorism & a ‘threat to security’: I have never, in all my years working with EU officials, heard one even brainstorm this idea. What is Mr de Bernières’s on about?
Read 5 tweets
28 Oct 19
Thread.
1/ Let' just 'deliver Brexit'? That's just fluff. Here's why:
Yes, the UK would 'Leave' the EU. But then nothing would change for years (transition period + multiple extensions - possibly until 2030 as that's how long a full trade deal takes to negotiate & ratify)...
2/ Except that, 'overnight' on Exit, the UK would lose 'all' its power in the EU (UK Commissioners, UK MEPs swinging votes in the European Parliament, UK govt veto in Council, etc). I worked with UK officials in Brussels: I saw our power first hand.
3/ After all those transition period extensions there would then be either a no deal 'hole' of (by this govt's own expert assessments) potential chaos and guaranteed huge economic loss, 'or' a trade deal. But a trade deal is still way 'less' than what we have now in EU.
Read 5 tweets

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