Should we really sell chocolate to Mexico?

BBC News reported Britain’s imminent accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership behind two stories about racism in cricket, giving no suggestion that it might represent a major economic breakthrough. Rather the opposite, with emphasis
on the cautious official prediction that CPTPP membership will add just 0.08 per cent to UK GDP over the next 15 years.

But as a former Asia-Pacific wanderer myself, I’m almost as excited as Lord Frost about the prospect of tariff-free trade with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. This canny grouping of 500 million consumers should offer huge opportunities for UK businesses – and no one seems to question its future growth path from 15 towards 20 per cent of global GDP, with half a dozen other industrious nations, including Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea, keen to join.

Meanwhile that other bloc of 500 million citizens with whom we used to be closely associated, the European Union, stands at a similar GDP level but is predicted to slip steadily backwards under the weight of bureaucracy, sloth and welfare bills. So Downing Street’s eastward swing of the telescope has prompted jubilation for Frost and others who obsess over the remote possibility that the UK might be conned by Rejoiners into reapplying for EU membership.

But the truth is that we’d like to do as much trade as possible with both half-billion markets – and prospects with our neighbour continent are not diminished in importance by our access to the more exciting, but distant and disparate, treaty group.

Chocolate to Mexico

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Zoe Strimpel

The trouble with Harvard

What we should really worry about is whether we have competitive, state-of-the-art products and services to offer our trading partners old and new, as well as to the US, India and others who, whenever they look this way, think first and foremost in terms of how much they can export to us.