The devil is in the detail of post-Brexit trade deals | Letters

Letters: If we succeed in making trade treaties they will mostly be on unfavourable terms, as we will be on the weak side in most cases

As many people suspected, and as is becoming more and more obvious, the UK, with its sweatshop economy, weak productivity and huge trade deficit, is going to find itself in very chilly waters after we leave the EU (‘Unsettled’ Brexit will hit UK growth, 17 January). If we succeed in making trade treaties they will mostly be on very unfavourable terms, as we will be on the weak side in most cases (especially with China, the US and the EU). It also becomes more and more obvious that in order to achieve even unfavourable terms we will have to submit to being dominated by big international companies, which will lead to the reintroduction of TTIP-style disputes procedures, a bonfire of labour and environmental protections and policies only acceptable to the hard right of the Conservative party. Brexit is wrong and dangerous: the only way forward is to reverse it.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter

• I read with distress your article (Brexit rush for US trade deal could force tough concessions, say critics, theguardian.com, 16 January). I found the comments of the UK’s ambassador to Washington staggering. For such a senior official to imply that farming is a low priority is worrying. Theresa May said on Tuesday that no trade deal is better than a bad trade deal. It is clear to me that a deal that fundamentally damages a country’s ability to feed an urbanised population through short, secure, local supply chains should be firmly categorised as a truly bad deal and one the government should avoid at all costs.

British farmers provide the building blocks to the largest manufacturing sector in the economy. While I, like many in the industry, are convinced farming will look different in future and believe there is clearly a need for a new contract between farmers and society, we must never forget that it is only British farmers who can deliver a safe, transparent and locally based food supply while also delivering landscapes, biodiversity and environmental protection. We must not allow these vital outputs to be overlooked during Brexit negotiations.
Stuart Roberts
(Cereal and beef farmer)
Harpenden, Hertfordshire

• One key aspect of reverting to WTO rules after Brexit is food supply. The UK imports about 50% of what it consumes, mainly from fellow EU member states. For animal products, the EU (and the UK in particular) has high animal welfare regulations, raising prices to the consumer. Higher prices of animal products within the EU versus global prices are often seen as a reason for Brexit, a misinformed view.

Thus Brexit will lead to lower food prices but also allow the UK to encourage “smallholding agriculture” on an “environmental protection” basis (George Monbiot passim), leading to higher food prices (economy of scale): mutually exclusive objectives here.

The WTO doesn’t accept animal welfare as a reason for preventing trade. There are attempts to overcome this, but even the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) concluded in 2002 that “animal welfare guidelines are not covered by any WTO agreements in the future”. Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser for Compassion in World Farming, concluded in 2015 that “Gatt [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] rules remain an important impediment to strengthening EU legislation (or that of other WTO members) on the protection of animals”, though he did hope for more positive developments in the future.

Post-Brexit UK would have to accept cheaper imports of animal products from outside the EU from stock raised under conditions that were, in pre-Brexit UK, completely illegal.
Professor Julian Wiseman
Professor of animal production, University of Nottingham

• The importance of the customs union should not be underestimated (Fog starts to clear (a little) as May sets out her aims for Brexit, 18 January). Last week I received notification that a parcel sent to me from Canada was being held by UK customs and would not be released until I provided a customs procedure code (seven digits), a commodity code (10 digits), a VAT/EORI number (12 digits), a deferment account number (7 digits) and an IPR/OPR/EU number (nine digits). I was also asked for a guarantee account reference number (if applicable), the address of the supervising customs officer, and the original export customs declaration number. None of those meant anything to me. Nevertheless, if that information was not provided within five days, the parcel could be returned to sender. I replied that the parcel contained printed scientific reports, of no commercial value; it has yet to arrive. Without the customs union, all mailings and deliveries from Europe will also presumably be subject to such bureaucracy.
Phillip Williamson
Norwich

• Your editorial (18 January) accepts Theresa May’s depiction of leaving the EU as “change” and staying in the EU as “hanging on to the European past”. But as I read it I was listening to David Davis listing the countries lining up to offer us trade deals: he mentioned New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US. So, back to the British empire, long before the EU was dreamed of?
William Wallace
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords

• The EU is not punishing and will not punish the UK for leaving the EU: the UK is showing the world it can do that to itself without any external help at all. When the PM says that “retaliation against the UK would not be the act of a friend”, how would she describe the UK turning its back on the EU after 40 years of friendship?

The UK needs to start accepting what Brexit is: it is the unilateral cancellation of a club membership which confers members privileges with strings attached.

When it leaves, the UK rejoins all other non-EU countries and from a basic WTO rules relationship, a bottom-up negotiation can take place to deepen trading ties where it is mutually beneficial for both sides. There will be economic as well as political trade-offs to be made on both sides.

But if the UK persists in viewing the EU negotiations from a top-down perspective, it will only lead to frustration and increase the unhelpful rhetoric of “punishment for leaving the EU” on both sides of the Channel: the unavoidable consequence of Brexit is that the UK’s future relationship with the EU will be on worse trading terms than they are now.

The sooner the UK political establishment accepts this fact and starts communicating this clearly to the UK masses, the better. After all, this was what they voted for and it’s the price to pay to return to full sovereignty.
Antero Touchard
Madrid, Spain

• Outside the single market and sucking up to President Trump’s new world order, Theresa May will probably have to accept something like a bilateral version of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to compensate for lost EU business. Unfortunately, as research conducted for the UK parliament on the trade potential of TTIP showed, there is very little scope for reducing tariffs further on UK-US exchanges. The only way to boost that trade would be to open up (effectively) UK public services to US corporate takeovers; eg privatisation of NHS sectors. This outcome, coupled with slashing of corporate tax rates to try to claw back more lost business, is more than a glimmer in the eye of cabinet Brexiteers. Please welcome Globalisation Mark II; but this time without the EU safety nets on health, safety, the environment and consumer and workers’ rights which opponents to TTIP proposals have been able to invoke in stalling the deal.
Bryn Jones
University of Bath

• There is much talk about first or last in the queue when the real issue is not when but what kind of trade deal the UK might end up with. So the UK should see how Trump handles Nafta re-negotiation before embarking on its negotiations.

Drafted by Reagan but enacted by Clinton before China’s rise was foreseen, Nafta didn’t produce an economic boom in Mexico to create the jobs that might have staunched the flow of illegal immigrants seeking better opportunities in the US, because production and jobs that could have ended up in Mexico went to China instead. But the outlook for TTIP, the UK-US model, is also poor for jobs. The official impact assessment commissioned by the European commission at the start of the negotiations predicted the loss of at least 1m jobs as a direct result of a successful EU-US deal. The European commission chose not to publicise these findings, seeing that the majority of the job losses – over 680,000 – would be experienced in EU countries, while the US would also see the loss of at least 325,000 jobs, and over twice that many if an “ambitious” TTIP deal went through. But the danger, as Dan Roberts reveals (Trade deal could put US business in driving seat, 17 January), is a race to the bottom as “multinational businesses … erode national regulations in favour of a more unfettered market access”. Should suit the Tories.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey

• Rafael Behr says that “it is safe to presume that the non-negotiable terms of that deal will be total vassalage to US corporate interests” (May can think big all she likes. Britain’s about to find out just how small it is, 18 January).

It’s worth thinking about the detail:

1. Smith & Wesson will require that our gun control laws be rescinded as they are clearly barriers to free trade.

2. American health insurers will demand the abolition of the “free at the point of use” NHS as that too will plainly be a trade barrier.

3. Fox News and Breitbart will insist on the dismantling of the BBC as it represents unfair competition.

Farming in New England has been pretty much reduced to a recreational activity for rich nostalgists following competition from the US midwest. Farming in “Old England” will suffer the same fate.

But it will all be OK, as we will have taken back control…
Andrew Syme
Perth, Scotland

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