A related story: When Raab banned UK officials from attending EU meetings in the run up to Brexit, Scottish officials kept going to some anyway.
On the UK presenting a united front thing, another related story: I remember witnessing a load of ERG MPs turn up in Warsaw in a last ditch attempt to convince the Polish government to veto any UK request to extend article 50.
Imports of food under an Australia-UK trade agreement wouldn’t qualify for tariff-free trade into Northern Ireland (until maybe EU also has an FTA) because the tariff differential between the EU and UK tariff will be > 3%.
As in, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of IP rules, if you want to vaccinate the whole world as quickly as possible the fastest way to do it is surely to pay the pharma companies ££££££ to license their vaccines and technologies to everyone else.
But if you want to pay pharma less/ make them share technology they don’t want to share, the threat of a covid vaccine waiver could give you additional leverage.
Something I wish I was taught in school is how to go about saving for a pension. And personal finance in general.
I mean, no one really tells you that personal & workplace contributions to pension should add up to ~10-15% of salary from moment you're working if want to comfortably retire. And that risk profile of auto enrolled work pension scheme probs not appropriate for a 20 year old. etc.
I mean, it's not particularly difficult to understand: if you put up large barriers to international trade, the expected result is trading becomes more expensive and difficult, and therefore there is less trade than if the barriers were not there.
🤷♂️
On specifics:
I’d expect exports of manufactured goods to rebound (in line with increasing EU demand) more strongly than UK exports of food, meat, shellfish etc which are ... not in a good place.
(I know everyone is much more excited about a different thing in the report, but there we go)
Yes, Singapore is a transhipment hub for the wider region, but
a) the UK-Singapore bilateral FTA has no impact on this for UK exports
b) increased transshipment would have shown up as increased exports to Singapore, not to to Japan and China.