Eighteen months after the EU referendum and nine months after Article 50 was triggered, the British cabinet is finally holding its first discussion on what the UK’s final relationship should be. The Brexiteers have long argued that Britain holds “the best cards” in the forthcoming trade negotiations. “You’ll sell less prosecco,” Boris Johnson warned Carlo Calenda, the Italian economic development minister, last year. The same is said of German cars and French cheese. In short: Europe needs Britain more than Britain needs Europe.
But a new University of Birmingham study efficiently exposes this as the wishful thinking that it is. “The UK and its regions are far more vulnerable to trade-related risks of Brexit than other EU member states and their regions,” it notes. “As such, the UK is far more dependent on a relatively seamless and comprehensive free trade deal than the other EU member states. Mercantilist arguments popular in the UK media, which posit that the UK trade deficit with the rest of Europe implies that on economic grounds other EU member states will be eager to agree a free trade deal with the UK, are not correct.”
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