There was an interesting exchange at the Treasury Select Committee in October 2015 when they were trying to understand the financial costs and benefits of being in the EU. On page 17 (HERE) Jacob Rees Mogg is talking to Phillipe Legrain, an economist from the LSE. They are talking about non-tariff barriers and the fact that the WTO has done little or nothing to liberalise trade in services while the EU has actually made some progress in this area, which is the sector that accounts for much of our exports. Rees Mogg says we could do this for ourselves if we left the EU.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: Not with the rest of the world. With the rest of the world, we could make the agreements that we wanted and would be free of overarching European regulations.
Simon Tilford: Again, that comes back to the points that Philippe made. Would, for example, Britain have more success in prising open Indian markets for commercial services if we were doing it on our own than as part of the EU as a whole? I tend to agree with Philippe on this one; I do not think Britain would be that effective on its own.
And this is the key passage :-
Philippe Legrain: The word “free” is kind of misleading, because any trade agreement involves a constraint on sovereignty. That is true of a WTO agreement; it is true of a bilateral trade agreement or an investment treaty. You are constraining your Parliament’s ability to act because you think that it provides an economic benefit.
Philippe Legrain: The word “free” is kind of misleading, because any trade agreement involves a constraint on sovereignty. That is true of a WTO agreement; it is true of a bilateral trade agreement or an investment treaty. You are constraining your Parliament’s ability to act because you think that it provides an economic benefit.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: No, because you do not have a court that is automatically the law in your own country. The sovereignty issue is not really relevant to the trade negotiations.
Philippe Legrain: Yes, it is.
Simon Tilford: It is.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: Not unless you have a sovereign court that can overrule you, because you can pull out of trade negotiations with other countries. This is not immediately relevant.
You can see how it works. You invite experts to provide evidence and then you give them your own prejudiced opinion. It's hard to see why anyone would bother giving advice to Rees Mogg at all, he is stuck in his own reality.
