Liam Fox our swivel eyed Trade Secretary says he will sign 40 free trade deals the second after Brexit (HERE) but these are not new ones, they are the existing FTAs that the EU already has and which we will actually lose the second after Brexit. There are doubts whether we will be allowed to copy and paste all of these deals as Fox seems to think we can. If we can't the FTA count will start at minus 40.
The Trade Secretary added that "All these faint hearts saying we cannot do it - it's absolute rubbish." Let's see how he does on these trade deals. I'll keep an eye on progress.
Mr Fox is a great friend of the USA and his colleague at DIT, Mark Garnier, was in America recently and wrote a piece for Brexit Central (HERE) claiming that global business increasingly see us as an integral trading partner (whatever that is). He visited Raleigh, Winston-Salem and Charlotte in North Carolina, and said he was struck by the desire to invest in the UK. They apparently "saw the potential in the country as a whole" – from the manufacturing hubs at the heart of the Midlands Engine to "our thriving maritime sector" in the Northern Powerhouse. Err, thriving maritime sector? Who told them that?
So, the announcement that the US is putting a 220% tariff on Bombardier wings made in Belfast cannot have been welcomed although Mr Garnier didn't mention it in his article. It is clear that the US has an America first approach to trade and as Peter North points out (HERE) they are no friend of the UK. A free trade deal between the UK and US will be heavily one sided.
Now the Thyssen-Krupp-Tata steel merger is putting jobs in Port Talbot at risk (HERE). The Welsh plant apparently has core earnings of 12 Euros per tonne (2%) while similar plants in Europe at IJmuiden, in the Netherlands, earns 92.4 euros (14%) and Thyssen-krupp’s key plant in Duisburg, Germany, will earn 85.4 euros per tonne, at a profit margin of 11 percent. Labour laws in Europe are far tighter than ours and with far lower earnings it doesn't take a genius to see which plants are at risk of closure.
And yesterday we learned Monarch Airlines is bust with 300,000 holiday makers flights cancelled. This is partly at least due to the fall in the value of the pound. Monarch's aircraft are leased in dollars and fuel is priced in dollars so the fall in sterling after last year's referendum has raised costs and made failure of the airline more likely. Uncertainty over the future after we leave the EU was said to be another concern.
The price of Brexit is starting to be paid.
