Free trade

The basis of the UK’s first bespoke trade deal since leaving the EU was finalised with Australia over two dinners. One took place in the garden of the residence of the Australian High Commissioner to the UK, where guests were fed Australian lamb. The other in Downing Street where Welsh lamb was on the menu. They were menu choices that pointed both to what the deal would achieve – zero tariffs, including on agricultural goods – and the main point of contention in a negotiation that has spanned nearly a year since talks began last June. In that time, there has been a Cabinet row over protectionism on Australian meat imports and

On Monday, the Department for International Trade released its negotiating objectives for a UK-USA free trade agreement. The 184-page document explains in detail what the UK wants to get out of a trade deal with America. The British government will try to angle the talks, which begin this month, towards securing a comprehensive arrangement – that is, a deal that covers a broad range of areas including digital, finance, tech, manufacturing and agriculture. If secured, it estimates this could translate into a £3.4 billion boost to the UK economy. The government has put its ‘leveling up’ agenda at front and centre of these trade talks, laying out how each region potentially stands

Downing Street briefings that the EU is ‘moving the goalposts’ for a free trade agreement and is belatedly demanding that the UK should not be compelled to maintain standards on state aid, competition, workers rights and environment seem either flaky or deliberately designed to once again cast Brussels as a duplicitous enemy. If you look at the March 2018 EU Council guidelines (below) for the future relationship between the EU and the UK and the actually-agreed framework for the future relationship agreed in October 2019 (also below), the importance for the EU of maintaining a level playing field between the UK and EU is explicit. The most important phrase in

Now the UK is leaving the EU, Boris Johnson’s government can start planning a serious trade strategy for life after Brexit. So far the focus has been on a UK/US free trade agreement. But before that, the initial challenge for Britain will be to establish a rational set of priorities. First, the government must ask what resources is it prepared to commit to trade policy? Second, it needs to establish what trade agreements would be most beneficial to the UK economy. After all, there’s no point in giving priority to a laborious trade negotiation with, say, Burkina Faso, if the benefits of that agreement would be very limited. And third,