Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Trump underlines potential UK isolation after Brexit
We were told that Brexit was about taking back control and yet our economy and trade depend on finding partners, striking deals with them and in the process, ceding some of that control over the movement of labour and goods.
Anybody who says differently is either lying or profoundly naïve. The UK cannot stand alone in an interdependent world dominated by multi-national companies.
The logic of Brexit is that we should not be locked into a single free trade area, even if it is the biggest in the world, accounts for 44% of our trade and holds the key to thousands of jobs and to our financial services sector, which is our biggest export.
The Brexiteers want to fish in what they think is a bigger pond. It is entirely a coincidence that a number of them have economic and business interests that may benefit from such a change in our trading arrangements.
In this context, comments yesterday from Donald Trump are particularly disturbing. As the Guardian reports, he delivered a weighty blow to Theresa May’s hopes of steering her Brexit deal through parliament, saying it sounded like a “great deal for the EU” that would stop the UK trading with the US.
Trump knows when he has the upper hand. If the UK leaves the EU we will have significantly less bargaining power, we will be desperately casting around for deals to compensate for the slump in our economy, and in doing so we will be negotiating from a position of weakness.
Brexit is not about retaining control, it is about ceding control to the likes of Donald Trump and China, whose dominance in world trade gives them carte blanche to dictate terms to any country that finds itself isolated and friendless on its own continent. As part of the EU we can resist that. Outside the EU we are on our own.
Anybody who says differently is either lying or profoundly naïve. The UK cannot stand alone in an interdependent world dominated by multi-national companies.
The logic of Brexit is that we should not be locked into a single free trade area, even if it is the biggest in the world, accounts for 44% of our trade and holds the key to thousands of jobs and to our financial services sector, which is our biggest export.
The Brexiteers want to fish in what they think is a bigger pond. It is entirely a coincidence that a number of them have economic and business interests that may benefit from such a change in our trading arrangements.
In this context, comments yesterday from Donald Trump are particularly disturbing. As the Guardian reports, he delivered a weighty blow to Theresa May’s hopes of steering her Brexit deal through parliament, saying it sounded like a “great deal for the EU” that would stop the UK trading with the US.
Trump knows when he has the upper hand. If the UK leaves the EU we will have significantly less bargaining power, we will be desperately casting around for deals to compensate for the slump in our economy, and in doing so we will be negotiating from a position of weakness.
Brexit is not about retaining control, it is about ceding control to the likes of Donald Trump and China, whose dominance in world trade gives them carte blanche to dictate terms to any country that finds itself isolated and friendless on its own continent. As part of the EU we can resist that. Outside the EU we are on our own.
