AFTER the impressive ceremony of the Queen’s state funeral it is back to politics and economics with a bang for the officers on deck of the sinking ship Britannia. And that hard reality reveals the UK as being all pomp with precious little circumstance.
The new Truss administration has promised a “blizzard of policy announcements” to demonstrate activity. In fact, all this will demonstrate is that the art of the cliche is still practised in the Downing Street press operation. Next thing you know they will announce a “bonfire of the quangos”.
At Westminster Abbey, Liz Truss was mistaken by Australian Television for a “minor royal”. As she flies into the General Assembly of the United Nations, she best beware being correctly identified as a “minor politician”, leading a failing country whose economic prospects are plummeting as fast as the plunging currency.
Truss’s candid confession on the way to the plane that talks on a free trade deal with the United States would not even start “in the short to medium term”, is an admission of devastating incompetence, a continuation of the “Titanic success” of Brexit, as forecast by her predecessor.
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Any incoming Prime Minister faced with such post-Brexit negligence would immediately expunge from her administration the previous international trade and foreign secretaries who had allowed this hiatus to develop. The problem for Liz Truss is that she herself was the occupant of both offices as the Brexit promise of a “mega transatlantic trade deal” crumbled into the dust.
It has been clear for some time that the US deal was on the back burner or at the “back of the queue” as Barack Obama famously said. It has been equally clear that the prospect once floated by the Johnson gang that the UK might instead apply to join the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement was also wishful thinking masquerading as a policy.
Indeed, that suggestion was unceremoniously buried almost as soon as the Daily Express breathlessly announced it exactly one year ago, claiming: “The multi-billion-pound trade tie-up would be a huge boost to Britain’s economy as it bounces back from the pandemic”.
In the cold reality of the “dawn’s early light”, none of this amounts to a hill of beans. The UK already has a serviceable trade deal with Canada inherited from the EU. Meanwhile, Mexico is the world’s 16th-biggest economy but ranks a mere 42nd in the UK’s trading partners.
Talks on a new trade deal were launched this summer by then trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan who has since been moved to transport.
A successful trade bilateral might lead to the refreshing sight of Mexico’s redoubtable President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador delivering another much-needed lecture to the UK on respect for Scotland’s democracy but will not transform the depressing position of the UK’s trade balance.
Even if the US itself was willing to embark on the big talks, a free trade deal with Washington would add much less than half of 1% to UK Gross Domestic Product – the Johnson administration lost more than that from UK output in the single month of June this year.
In addition, it would be hugely problematic, with widespread fears of predatory US companies turning their greedy, beady eyes on what is left of the National Health Service to say nothing of enough hormones in beef to ensure every one of us would fail an Olympics drug test.
Agricultural trade is the number one headache at the International Trade Organisation right now and there is little appetite internationally for yet further complications.
The real significance of the abject Tory failure on US trade is not economic but political.
The UK is at the back of the queue because it simply does not matter.
The Biden administration has a host of other more pressing economic questions and, in any case, is in no mood to do the UK any favours – and showing any urgency on a trade deal would require exactly that.
Truss has been as blinkered as Johnson in seeking to unravel the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiated by Lord Frost – the latest darling of the Tory grassroots bigots but a man whose sense of his own destiny stands in inverse proportion to his negotiating ability. Joe Biden is widely mocked. He dodged the bus trip to the Queen’s funeral but then ended up 14 rows back, to be lampooned by his predecessor as being lost among the “Third World leaders”.
Biden is big enough not to mind that unduly. However the Irish in him does very much mind the UK’s disgraceful treatment of the Irish Republic, in the attempt to destroy a protocol which has brought about the best economic performance in Northern Ireland relative to the rest of the nations and regions of the UK since records began. And one of course which has majority support in the north as well as unanimous support in the south.
If Liz Truss asks for trade deal directions in New York from the American president, she is likely to be told “if I were you, I would not have started from here”.
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