Posted on 01/20/2020 4:22:44 PM PST by nickcarraway
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Leave supporters have always expounded the virtues of being outside the EU, including the ability to negotiate its own trade deals on its own terms for the benefits of its own citizens.
Being part of a big gang has its advantages and disadvantages.
Yes, you have to make compromises and adapt your goals to match commonly-agreed policies. But you also get the power of the bloc behind you in trade negotiations.
Where does this leave Africa? The UK's International Development Secretary, Alok Sharma, is, as one would expect, very optimistic saying that Britain's relations with Africa will be "turbo-charged", with trade, business and investment deals being struck left, right and centre.
The UK government seems to be taking it seriously.
The UK-Africa Investment Summit can be seen as evidence of that but any potential change in actual trade conditions is some way off. Possibly years.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
They’d be better off courting the US for a trade pact. Africa isn’t going to be a mature business opportunity for UK firms for decades, if then.
Europeans have been working trade deals with Africans for generations. But the deals have been exploitative of accessing mineral, ore, oil, agricultural, fishery, and other natural resources. This is likely to remain the case, since Africans have never shown any ability to deliver added value needed for modern industrial development. Its fine for the UK, though, if they can make lucrative deals for the natural resources they can apply elsewhere to their factories in the developed world. Brexit had no role to play in any of this. Why the writer makes this connection is not clear.
PM Johnson has been taking lessons from the POTUS - good for him. I believe US/Brit trade talks will turn out great.
It has a role in the sense that, without it, the UK was unable to negotiate trade deals on its own behalf.
The UK trade restrictions only applied to the Eurozone. They always had the ability to form their own trade relationships outside of Europe. Brexit wasnt needed to make deals in Africa.
Sorry, but that’s not the case. Trade deals with non-EU countries are negotiated and agreed by the EU as a whole, not by the individual member states. The treaty rules oblige member states to abide by this - if they didn’t, it would make nonsense of, for instance, the EU customs union. In consequence, throughout the years of EU membership the UK has had no trade negotiators of its own (although there have been British trade negotiators working for the EU), and has had to recruit trained and skilled negotiators from elsewhere (particularly Canada and Australia) to gear up for the freedom to negotiate post-Brexit.
I get your point. But the UK could have negotiated their own trade agreements and lived with the repercussions. They just chose to go along with the EU restrictions. The Common Market, which was focused on the Eurozone, was never intended to subsume national sovereignty for its members outside that region. That it was allowed to morph itself into a latter day Roman Empire that claimed powers it never should have had is a testament to the craven nature of the European bureaucracy and the cowardliness of most of its European subjects. Until now, that is...
The existence of that unitary trading bloc was the reason the UK (and others) chose to join in the first place. It's obvious that the ability to negotiate deals as a bloc would be fatally undermined if individual member states were free to strike side deals on their own. Every new member, first of the EC, subsequently the EU, fully understands this and signs up to it on joining - it's not something retrospectively forced on them by an all-powerful EU. It was something the UK actively wanted, not some kind of bitter pill subsequently enforced.
The EU currently has trade deals with over 50 countries, with many more in preparation. The full list is here:
European Union Free Trade Agreements
These are now de facto the UK's agreements. They will case to be so when the UK leaves.
Thank you for the clarification. But there were always special arrangements allowed in the EU. Britain never accepted the Euro as its currency and chose to keep the Pound. I believe the UK could have made a similar case for other issues like trade deals outside the EU but didn’t want to fight for it. Eventually the EU morphed into a bureaucratic monster that became dominated by the Germans to the detriment of most everyone else. Its a mess that its remaining member countries are going to struggle to manage. Wait until President Trump lowers the boom on the EU like he did to China. It’ll be great to see!
That's the perception assiduously propagated by the Europhobe British media for many years; a perception which successive British governments didn't try too hard to counter, since it was easy to blame the EU for unpopular measures which were actively or passively assented to, and in many case actually originated, by the British government of the day.
The reality is somewhat more nuanced. Here's a nice anecdotal observation of Britain's influence in the EU by a (relatively) neutral observer: an Irish diplomat who represented his country at the EU for many years, and was able to watch at close quarters how his British opposite numbers operated:
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