Sunday 8 May 2016

Post-Brexit, the UK would have no free trade agreements with the USA or China… er...

As somebody on the internet pointed out (I can't remember who): "So what?".

The UK is a Member State of the EU, which in turn has no formal free trade agreement with China or the USA (yet).

Those countries have their domestic rules, we/the EU have ours and things seem to work fairly well, don't they? The TTIP will almost certainly make things worse, so the absence of a formal free trade agreement is not really a problem.

8 comments:

Steven_L said...

Will TTIP make things worse? Who for? If US safety standards are really so bad why doesn't the FCO warn you not the eat the food there? A lot of EU and US standards are based on WTO texts. The EU are more anal about chemicals than the US. But does this mean US consumer products are 'dangerous'?

For a typical consumer, doesn't TTIP just mean they will be able to buy cheaper Nike's and Levis?

Mark Wadsworth said...

SL, apparently, US consumer/product standards are in many ways higher than ours - great. Maybe we should copy them, maybe they go too far. I'm no expert.

That is not the point, TTIP is all about making life easy for multi-national corporations, it has nothing to do with 'free trade' as such.

Lola said...

MW. Correct. From what I have been able to find out TTIP is a crony corporatist stitch up between two crony corporatist outfits - the EU and the US Federal Government.

DP said...

Dear Mr Wadsworth

And in other (old) news:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/12/brexit-could-harm-global-crimefighting-work-says-head-of-britain/

Mrs Owens was appointed head of the NCA just before her police & crime commissioner started the process to have her sacked as Surrey's Chief Constable.

No comments on the Telegraph item, but there are on the Daily Mail's:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3427914/New-214-000-year-head-UK-s-FBI-faced-fired-old-job-child-protection-failures-including-case-murdered-teenager-Breck-Bednar.html

DP

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, ta.

DP, hehe, good one.

Boggart Blogger said...

I read the first comment in the thread and thought I might be the only person to comment who had actually read up on what TTIP will mean o us punters. Fortunately things improved a lot. The whole thing has been negotiated in strictest secrecy of course so we only know what we know thanks to Wikileaks.
The fact that it has been negotiated in secret, with even the elected representatives on the people, members of the US Congress and EU member state national assemblies not allowed to know what it contained should be enough to convince all except the most ardent supporters of the global totalitarian government project that it is not something we want or need.

paulc156 said...

TTIP is bad for two reasons. It's primarily about extending already lengthy patent protection for the likes of Pfizer and Microsoft and hardly anything to do with reducing already low tariffs. Furthermore it's about circumventing the ability if national parliaments to legislate in ways which offend the corporate cronies. ie. It's doing and end run around democracy.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BB and PC156, being against TTIP is one of the few things that unites lefties and libertarians.