Australian analysis of a post-Brexit trade deal with Britain paints a gloomy picture of life outside the European Union.
With the UK starting the consultation process for the Australian trade agreement Steve Analyst posted a report that already details what a future deal might look like from an Australian perspective, and it doesn’t look good.
Despite promises from Liam Fox to reinvigorate the Commonwealth partnership with a host of trade deals after Brexit a parliamentary enquiry on trade relationship with the UK showed little promise of this materialising.
The investigation shows that Australians are in fact more concerned with damaging their relationship with Europe and have little appetite for getting caught up in the “possibly unrealistic worldview of the Brexiteers”.
It details how the UK has quite possibly overestimated the desire of third countries to trade with it outside of the EU, and has underestimated how long it will take to do meaningful deals.
In one particularly damning statement, the report reads that “the UK government’s attempts to signal a willingness to enter into trade negotiations once Brexit is complete suggest an Anglosphere pattern.
“(It) seems like a nice off-the-peg solution to fill the policy vacuum created by Brexit.
“Yet a reordering based on ties of history and language is not as clearly advantageous as it might seem.
“The UK trade mission to India in 2016 was not deemed a success.
“It is possible that the UK government has overestimated the desire of third countries to trade with the UK outside of the EU, and vastly underestimated the degree of difficulty in securing meaningful deals in the short term”.
The advice of academics based on the analysis is for Australia to sit and wait it out. Any turmoil created by exiting the EU would therefore be isolated to Britain, and it is clear that other nations want no involvement in it until the storm has blown over.
As Analyst notes, “there may be history between Australia and the UK, but nostalgia should not override trade realities”.
Pragmatism over tradition will out, and Britain could be one more trade partner light after it exits the union next year.
Read the report in full below:
RELATED
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/should-we-apply-the-precautionary-principle-to-brexit/03/10/
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/boris-borders-and-bolshevik-bashing-the-tories-are-dragging-the-uk-backwards%EF%BB%BF/03/10/
