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Your support makes all the difference.There would be no disruption to trade with the European Union if Britain voted to leave, a Conservative member of the Cabinet has said.
Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House of Commons, said it was in EU member states’ financial interest to keep trading with the UK in the event of Brexit and so a new deal would be sorted quickly.
The Cabinet member said a new deal would be agreed “quick enough to ensure that there wasn’t a hiatus in trading” because otherwise French farmers would be “out on the French motorways blockading them and burning hay bails”.
“We have a £50bn plus a year trade deficit with the European Union. We buy far more from them than they buy from us,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“The jobs at risk if we do not rapidly move to a trading arrangement are in Bavaira, and France, and Italy and Spain.
“People tend to move pretty quickly when they themselves are going to move out financially.
“There is no way that countries in continental Europe who benefit enormously from jobs, from business from selling to us, are going to put that business in jeopardy.”
An earlier analysis of the issue by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research noted that while the UK had a “trade deficit” with the EU, the EU constituted a larger proportion of British exports than Britain constituted a proportion of EU exports.
Mr Grayling was reacting to Cabinet Office review reported in the Guardian newspaper that claimed it would taken 10 years for Britain to leave the EU.
“A vote to leave the EU would be the start, not the end, of a process. It could lead to up to a decade or more of uncertainty,” the civil servants who wrote the report say.
The officials claim that the “decade” figure is an estimate of the amount of time it might take to set up a trade deal.
Former EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson said in October last year that a trade deal with the EU would take up between two and 10 years and be a “long, complex and disagreeable” process.
Eurosceptics have taken to accusing the In campaign of fearmongering in recent days. Yesterday Iain Duncan Smith, who is campaigning for Brexit, appeared to accuse David Cameron and George Osborne of having a “low opinion of the British people”.
“We talk about them not being capable, that we’re too small. I have a different view, that Britain is a great country, the people are inventive, innovative, and they will find a way to actually have a real deal,” he said.
Mr Duncan Smith however himself highlighted that one of the founding fathers of the EU, Altiero Spinelli, was an “ex-communist”.
Cabinet ministers have been permitted by the Prime Minister to campaign on either side of the EU referendum, which is to be held on 23 June.
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