The Japan trade deal shows how desperate we are for investment

A small cheer for Liz Truss’s treaty with Japan. It is, says the official press release, ‘the UK’s first major trade deal as an independent trading nation’ — and we must hope, the harbinger of much bigger deals to come. Even on the government’s own analysis, this one claims to deliver just £1.5 billion to the UK economy and an increase in UK workers’ wages of ‘£800 million in the long run’, whatever that means. What it highlights, I’m afraid, is the imbalance between the range of goods and services that the post-industrial UK is actually able to offer foreign partners — and how much more we need from them, chiefly in the form of inward investment.

On one side, we’re desperate for the Japanese to continue investing in our car and rail industries, most especially in the Nissan plant at Sunderland and the Hitachi train factory at Newton Aycliffe; and we sincerely wish Hitachi and Toshiba would reverse their decisions to pull out of building nuclear power stations here. On the other side, we’ll be able to sell them more knitwear, biscuits, English sparkling wine, Welsh lamb — and malt to make their own whisky so they don’t need to buy ours.

Then there’s financial services, at which we’re still pretty good: but has any foreign entrant ever successfully penetrated Japan’s domestic market? And finally, of course, there’s blue cheese. I scoffed when this quintessentially British product was spun as the ace in Liz Truss’s negotiating hand last month, but sure enough it won a place in the final announcement. And I’m pleased to see someone at the table was batting for Yorkshire’s finest creamery: Wensleydale’s name appears five paragraphs above Stilton’s.