Terrific story on Bloomberg (HERE) about Britain's attempt to join the WTO's Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). To show how many friends we've got, the "U.S., New Zealand Japan, South Korea, Ukraine, and Israel [expressed] concern that the U.K. application didn’t pass muster, according to officials familiar with the accession procedure. U.S. reticence was due to the U.K.’s failure to provide requested information and updates". But this isn't the best part of it.
What have we done to upset them? Moldova's Ambassador couldn't get a visa to come to the UK last year to discuss their future relationship with the UK post Brexit. It was a slight they haven't forgotten. And it means we now can't get access to $1.7 trillion of government contracts around the world.
The old saying about being nice to people on the way up because you never know if you might need them on the way down was never so true. How many national noses have we put out of joint in the last three of four centuries? Quite a lot I think.
