Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

I misunderstood then. It sounded to me like you were claiming that the expanded non EU trade routes were negating the losses

But isn't that a trick of the figure?

On your pie chart of trade partners, if trade with the EU declines by 10%, trade with other people must increase by 10%.

It doesn't capture the overall value of trade has decreased by £X billion.

But that's terrible news for the UK. It's not as if there is a rival European Single Market it can do business with.

They're not "drifting apart". They are being driven apart. By policies freely and unilaterally adopted by the UK.

The UK isn't finding new trading partners so much as finding fewer trading partners. UK exports are falling because fewer people want to buy them. Currently, exports to non-EU countries are not rising to partly offset the fall in exports to the EU; they are in fact falling faster than exports to EU countries are.

Imports (from both EU and non-EU countries) are still rising, though modestly, but this is almost certainly due to the fact that the UK has not yet begun to apply the bulk of its import control processes. When they do, the expectation is that imports will fall.

If EU-UK trade is diminished by barriers resulting from Brexit, both the EU and the UK may hope to develop alternative markets. It doesn't follow that they will succeed. Things don't happen just because we would like them to. Brexit gives the UK a reason to want to increase trade with non-EU countries, but it does nothing - nothing at all - to position the UK to actually increase it.

Your claims that trade with non-EU countries is increasing is backed up with information only about trade with the US. More to the point, the figures offered only go up to 2019, and so of course relate to the period before the UK brexited. Brexit happened on 31 January 2020, and the transition period ended on 31 December 2020.

The UK's Office of National Statistics provides figures which cover all of the UK's trade, not just trade with the US, and it provides more up-to-date figures. The most recent trade statistical bulleting covers the period up to June 2021; it was issued in August. It confirms that total UK exports fell by 2.2%, with exports to non-EU countries falling faster, by 5.6%. That fall is probably down to Covid-related issues rather than to Brexit but, nevertheless, it doesn't do much to support the notion that non-EU markets have been successfully developed to offset the inevitable Brexit-related fall in EU exports.

The bottom line here is that Brexit will inevitably tend to reduce the UK's trade with the rest of the world. People will hope that the reduction can be minimised by keeping it focussed on trade with the EU, and perhaps even partly offset by developing trade with the rest of the world, but this won't be easy and, so far, there isn't a lot of evidence that it is being achieved. There can be no assumption that it will happen; Brexit does nothing to leave the UK better-positioned to develop its trade with the rest of the world; anything the UK can do in that regard it could have done before Brexit. And, if it was likely to be effective, wouldn't they have done it before Brexit?

Yup. My bad. Sorry, CHBS.

It is a fact of gravity in trade that you will do more business with your immediate neighbours than anyone else.

The loss in European trade can never ever be made up elsewhere.

Even the most ambitious possible US trade deal with the UK is estimated at best to only add 0.3% total to UK GDP.

It's miniscule.

I see the DUP are launching another assault on the protocol. I don't get it, Boris went into the election on the back of his oven ready deal and won a large majority on the back of it. If the DUP decided that they will go against this and stop it from happening then Nationalists should just refuse to deal with the assembly until the UK rejoins the EU. I am no fan of Boris by any stretch of the imagination but this is what the UK voted for just like Brexit.

Never mind that it is the first piece of good news for the NI economy since I don't know when.

Edit: misread

I believe that is the point. They can't outright state that the border has to go within Ireland but they can oppose anything that doesn't involve a hard border on the island.

The EU are not going to negotiate with a small party in a province of the UK. I think the DUP were well under 20% in the most recent NI opinion poll. They will insist that all negotiations are between the British govt and the EU.