> It essentially makes compliance to EU law optional for companies operating in the UK. That's a huge advantage. Choose to trade on EU terms with the single market, or choose to trade on other terms with international targets.
When the UK was in the EU, it was never a requirement for goods sold to non-EU countries to meet EU regulations. On that front, nothing has changed: selling to EU, you need to meet EU laws; selling elsewhere you need to meet theirs.
Is that true? When the UK was part of the EU, goods manufactured in the UK would have to comply with UK laws, which would have to be equivalent to or stronger than the EU laws.
Only if they were being sold in the UK, because the UK had trading standards which complied with EU trading standards.
So if you’re lowering the bar, you’re doing it for the UK primarily. But our trading standards were higher then the EU base ones. So, not sure what we gain.
But yes, if you produce goods not destined for the UK market, it was completely fine for you not to meet EU standards.
Yes. And the EU negotiated with other countries on our behalf - with unbelievable bargaining power as the world’s premier trading block.
Now we’re a country of 70 million in a world of 7 billion trying to negotiate within a world dominated by bigger and more powerful nations and trading blocks.
We went from a big player in the biggest block to a medium player all alone.
That's an entirely different point, not any point missed by the comment you're replying to.
What connects the two points is that they hold similar appeal in theory, and are entirely meaningless in practice. The UK has signed a number of trade agreements already, and none of them contain meaningful differences to the EU agreements the UK was previously part of.
Sure, you get more freedom to negotiate your own terms, at the cost of being a significantly smaller player. So you lose some leverage and gain some elsewhere.
It's really to early to tell how this will shake out, but it's obviously as silly to assume either that in general UK will be able negotiate better deals on its own than as part of the EU, or that it won't be able to negotiate any good deals.
One thing I think that is telling is that I heard the UK government has characterized this as a "Canada like" agreement (e.g. NAFTA).
I think there is some deeper truth in this. UK is setting itself up to be in a very similar role, i.e. Canada::USA -> UK::EU.
When you are the junior partner in a tightly coupled trade partnership, you have a lot of nominal freedom in practice you are going to steered by the larger player, both intentionally and not.
Who was it that said, "When America sneezes, Canada gets a cold"? I think that was originally a european saying, so we've come full circle.
I'm not sure people in the UK have really come to terms with this, yet. There is no plausible return path to, say, pre-war UK on the world stage. There might be room for another Canada though.
Usually means labels, safety, privacy, worker rights, quotas, etc. The EU has a vast amount of regulations that protect consummers but make business harder/more expensive. The UK should retain most of those independently, will probably fudge some of them.
The EU rule is minimum 15%, the UK choses 20% of its own accord.
But that's not the interesting bit, the interesting bit is the follow-up question: "what stops the UK changing this from within the EU?"
The answer for this one is nothing - in fact, EU states have already agreed that all states will have full VAT setting powers from 2022.
>> biofuels directive
You'd need to give more context here - Boris Johnson has committed £12 billion partly in support of going beyond the requirements of this directive as part of the so called "new green revolution".
What exactly is the conflict with the biofuels directive? If anything it's weaker than the current UK Gov's expressed desires in this space?
Thank you for the information on the VAT directive changing in 2022. Is that the definitive VAT system? I've not really been following EU legislation for the last few years.
The thing that concerns me with the biofuels directive is it's requirement for 5% of petrol to be made up of biofuel. As the cheapest source of this is palm oil, we then end up contributing to the destruction of habitats in Indonesia in order to grow palm oil to burn in our cars. The EU does recognise this and I'm sure I read that come 2030, that will be disallowed, but then they will likely need to use Soy or some other oil that will cause even more destruction.
I don't have any sources for this to hand and I may well have some of this information incorrect. It's been about five years since I researched much of this.
The only reason to do that is price, which importing (from the USA, presumably) would surely negate. When chlorinated chicken has been brought up as a debate point it's as an example of a standard that might slip, that cheaper UK chicken might be chlorinated for a UK market.
Yes - but now we can trade with those countries on our terms, not an aggregated decision on how we can trade set by EU legislation. Before we wouldn't need to meet single market standard to trade with those countries, but the overall terms would depend on EU trade deals or standard rules.
This is why leaving the customs union is key to any reasonable Brexit deal.
I'm not even trying to argue that Brexit is good necessarily, but more rationalizing why the deal always had to be what it is. Anything else other than staying in the EU isn't a beneficial option for the UK - unless joining EFTA, or similar.
> Yes - but now we can trade with those countries on our terms…
Er no, we get to trade with them on their terms, having just lost the benefits of any preferential terms negotiated by the EU. Those “overall terms depending on EU trade deals” were overwhelmingly favourable terms negotiated thanks to the immense negotiating power of the whole EU trade bloc. We’ve now lost almost all of that.
And bear in mind a lot of these EU trade deals weren’t forced on us, we played a leading role in negotiating those deals ourselves. Now we’ve lost the benefit of a lot of that hard work.
Fortunately we have negotiated maintaining trade access with some countries, including Canada and Japan under our former EU arrangements. On many other cases though I believe including India, no such luck so far.
There was never an ambition to diverge on day one. But as the COVID vaccine authorisation and rollout has shown, the UK is (somewhat) free to choose to do things which will influence the EU (in this example via the German press) to the mutual benefit of everyone. Sometimes 'solidarity' can prevent anyone from setting a good example.
There is a right to ask permission for emergency authorisation in the EU. It was not given, and still probably wouldn't have been given if the UK hadn't rolled out the vaccine.
This is simply untrue, and spreading such misinformation has been the hallmark of lying right-wing politicians in the UK - Farage, Rees-Mogg, François etc.
A direct quote from The Financial Times [1]:
"Was the UK able to do this [provide emergency authorisation for the Pfizer vaccine] because of Brexit?
Agree that's the situation in the short term, but there's no avoiding that. We can go on to negotiate and agree our own deals with those countries ourselves in the long term.
They will be different agreements, obviously - while they may be lesser overall they can at least be more targeted to our specific interests rather than a whole bloc, which may yield some advantages for the UK.
Again, not trying to say this is necessarily better than staying in, but it does have its own advantages as well as compromises.
Which countries? What major untapped markets are in need of what the UK exports but don't already have it? About 60% of our exports are services, particularly financial and insurance and we just lost passporting rights to the EU on those.
The EU is not perfect but we've fucked off out of it without planning or preparing what to do next. I mean the deal that we'll be trading under in 7 days time has only just been agreed and isn't even ratified.
Again, it's not that we don't have access to those other markets in the EU, it's that the terms are set by the EU as a bloc.
Now, it'll be up to the UK to negotiate the specific terms with those markets, while being able to access free trade with the single market.
Absolutely agree it's absurd that the deal comes so late with basically 0 time to really prepare, but negotiations between blocs, countries and even small domestic businesses always go right down to the wire, just a human thing.
None of which answers the question - which significant new markets exist for UK goods and services?
Unless you count tax evasion and money laundering - something the UK was doing okay at already - there simply aren't any.
There is no promised land here, no sunlit uplands, no glorious future as an independent trading nation. In reality the UK has just pulled the rug out from under its most productive service sector and cut out the heart of its tax base.
And it doesn't have the skills or the culture to develop new service markets, because it's thinking like a 19th century imperial power running a 19th century economy, not like an interconnected smaller power with significant unique skills and talents in a mixed 21st century economy.
When you sell a plane or a computer or a tractor to a foreign country you don't just sell an item that needs to be shipped. You also sell training, spares, continuing support, consultancy. and business development.
These were relatively friction-free when freedom of movement was a thing. Now they're much harder, because they rely on employees visiting customers and possibly staying with them for long periods - which can't be done with paperwork and restrictions.
This "deal" makes all of this much harder for EU trade, and does nothing at all to make it easier in Rest of World.
And all of this held up for weeks by arguments about fish, which are barely a rounding error in GDP terms.
Why would the US sign a free trade deal with the UK, when it wouldn't sign one with the much larger EU? I fully expect my government to insist on conditions favorable towards the much larger and much richer party in UK-US trade relations.
Because before the EU can sign off on a trade agreement, it needs to be unanimously accepted by every member state, which takes an absolute ton of time. The CETA deal with Canada was held up solely by a region of Belgium at one point.
It's a lot easier to get a trade deal with the UK, where you're only dealing with one government with a much more specific set of interests.
> Australia’s a perfect trading partner in a lot of ways but it’s just too far away in a world that cares about reducing carbon footprints.
On one hand, yeah. But on the other hand, an article floating around in the last few weeks pointed out that modern container shipping is really cost effective these days.
Apparently container ships have also been looking at modern/environment friendly approaches for a while now too (including big wind kites(?) I think). So, that's somewhat likely to further improve over time as well.
Not trying to, just rationalizing why the deals been set. I think it's actually a pretty fair compromise from both sides - doesn't necessarily mean it's better than being in though!
Except now we're a small economy and one that's shown itself willing to break international laws we'd only just signed up to. Not something most trading partners are looking for.
> Yes - but now we can trade with those countries on our terms, not an aggregated decision on how we can trade set by EU legislation.
No, we trade with those countries on the terms of our trade agreements with those countries, which will more or less be the higher of each partners' standards on each involved aspect (unless there is no trade agreement at all, then it's WTO terms which are the same the EU would get).
The only realistic difference to trade policy being out of the EU is that we can lower our standards with respect to the EU when negotiating deals with third countries. The EU already had some of the highest standards in the world for workers rights, food safety and animal welfare and safety, and I don't think we'll be selflessly rising above those any time soon.
> and I don't think we'll be selflessly rising above those any time soon.
The UK has expressed continued interest in raising animal standards beyond those enforced by the EU - the PM even mentioned it in his speech as an example where the UK will go further in regulation.
I get that you can save some pages in a trade agreement that would otherwise be dedicated to protecting Spanish oranges (insert any other good produced in EU but not in Britain here) but those pages were never of consequence to Britain anyway.
That certainly was so in many areas, less so as they synchronised more over time (many EU standards born out of originating UK ones). But definitely an opportunity to raise standards.
Now - how that works if say the UK raises a standard and the impact upon EU imports. For example the EU regulations for `carper dust sucker` was questioned by Dyson for being flawed. Now if the UK does it's own standards that have to be followed for `carpet dust sucker` to be sold in the UK that exceeds EU standards then that could be interesting.
So the prospect of a trade war via standards used to limit external competition and sudo subsidise companies in that cunning way - could be something we could well see down the line. That equally could work both ways.
Which all makes how this trade agreement is worded in need of scrutiny as rules to protect one way, will also word both ways in such agreements to lock-in standards. Now if they refer to just EU standards as a base and no reference to equally protection to UK standards or whatever is the higher. Small details like that could have some interesting ramifications later on.
One thing is for sure - we are still a long way off from a standard global shoe size that is used by all. Which say's little and lots about trade and standards country to country.
Nope customs Union would have been fine, as it would have compromised between those that want the best for the economy and those that are more concerned about immigration.
Those talking about “sovereignty” as if there is such a thing as sovereign vs non-sovereign nations are a minority of Brexit voters and did not need to be pandered to. Unfortunately they made up a good proportion of the ruling class.
When you sell to any country you sell on their terms. When they sell to your country, they sell on your terms. You always have to meet their regulations unless you are so more powerful that you can twist their arm and do as you wish.
When the UK was in the EU, it was never a requirement for goods sold to non-EU countries to meet EU regulations. On that front, nothing has changed: selling to EU, you need to meet EU laws; selling elsewhere you need to meet theirs.