Is Liam Fox to blame for our lack of Brexit trade deals?

Analysis: With just six of 40 agreements signed off, Ben Chapman looks at whether the international trade secretary is at fault

(AFP/Getty)

One second after Brexit, all 40 of the EU’s trade deals will be rolled over and replaced with UK-specific versions. Or at least that’s what we were told by Liam Fox in 2017.

The confidence beaming from the international trade secretary as he set off on his world tour to convince governments to do business with “global Britain” was notably absent this week.

With little to show for his efforts, Fox was forced into an embarrassing climbdown, finally conceding that many of those trade deals had no chance of being ratified by 29 March.

So where are we now – and why has Liam Fox fallen so far short of his own bar?

No deal will be done in time with valuable trading partners Turkey and Japan, nor with the tiny European principalities of Andorra and San Marino.

Fox has so far delivered just six of the 40 deals he promised. The biggest positive he can point to is an agreement with Switzerland, a country which took £20bn of UK exports in 2017.

By comparison, the UK shipped £278bn of goods and services to the EU in 2017. A deal with the trading bloc, Fox told us, would be “the easiest in human history”.

The only other agreements he has so far been able to finalise in close to three years of toil account for a tiny percentage of UK trade. Israel is the largest among these, buying £2.4bn of UK goods and services, with £1.6bn flowing the other way.

Agreements sealed with the Palestinian territories and the Faroe Islands will do little to keep post-Brexit Britain afloat. We also have a deal with the 21 countries which make up the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, but only Egypt accounts for anything more than a negligible amount of UK trade.

Among the remaining countries in the group are two, which, according to official figures, imported no UK goods last year: Eritrea and Comoros.

There is of course a chance that agreements will be reached in the next 35 days but Fox’s announcement hardly inspires confidence.

He attempted to reassure the public with news that formal agreements are close with Fiji and Papua New Guinea. But that simply served to highlight the lack of progress on agreements with far more important trading partners.

True, we have some form of agreement with the US, Australia and New Zealand but these mostly cover product standards. They aren’t full trade deals.

“Particularly intensive discussions” are happening with the European Economic Area, South African Customs Unions, Canada and South Korea, the trade secretary says – which sounds distinctly like they won’t be signed in time.

It all seems like tinkering around the edges when you compare the figures involved to the vast sums of trade we conduct with the other 27 EU member states.

None of this is to say that our trade secretary has been incompetent or lazy. No one said rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was easy. And negotiating trade deals is even more fiendishly complex – they frequently amount to hundreds of clauses covering standards and tariffs on vast numbers of products.

Deals often take years to finalise, even for skilled negotiators focused on one agreement, let alone 40.

Whether through arrogance or ignorance, Liam Fox did not listen to trade experts who said dozens of EU deals could not be “rolled over” with ease.

He assured everyone it could be done, but that was never truly the case.

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