Bizarre pointing of finger at Joe Biden for Brexit failure

She pointed the finger for the UK’s failure to meet its target of having 80% of its trade covered by free trade agreements - which the Conservatives said back in 2019 would be achieved by the end of 2022 - at US President Joe Biden.

With the current vintage of Tories, it seems almost instinctive for them to blame their failures, and there have been lamentably many of them, on someone else.

Ms Badenoch talked about having an “independent trade policy” - which seemed to be a pointed reference to the ruling Conservatives’ beloved Brexit and an attempt to make an ideological point.

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Surely bizarrely, when asked to crystallise UK trade policy in her appearance before MPs on the Business and Trade Committee on Tuesday, she immediately focused on the distant Indo-Pacific. Ms Badenoch appeared to play down the potential for boosting exports to European economies as she tried to make a big deal of the UK having joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

Hopefully she knows the European single market is the biggest destination for UK exports - which should come as no surprise because it is on our doorstep rather than on the other side of the world.

Asked by Business and Trade Committee chairman and Labour MP Liam Byrne to crystallise UK trade policy now, Ms Badenoch replied: “It’s very much having an independent trade policy that deals with …the ever-coming, ever-new challenges that the global geopolitical environment is providing…

“So what is the challenge that we are facing? Limited growth across the world, mature European economies. We are looking to where the growth in the world is coming from - it is mostly the Indo-Pacific. Making sure that we strengthen our ties with countries in the Indo-Pacific is the policy, so CPTPP is a classic example of that.”

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Ms Badenoch, still on the topic of the Indo-Pacific, also flagged “lots of smaller trade initiatives, individual FTAs, with some of the countries”.

She concluded: “That broadly encapsulates what the strategy is.”

It was a staggering response. No mention of the potential for exports to Europe, beyond a description of these economies as “mature”.

Office for Budget Responsibility chairman Richard Hughes, when asked in March 2023 by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about how much stronger the UK economy would be had the country stayed in the EU, replied: “We think that in the long run it reduces our overall output by around 4% compared with had we remained in the EU.”

The UK Government’s own assessment is that joining the CPTPP, as it has, will boost the country’s gross domestic product by just 0.08 per cent in the long run.

The OBR’s projection of the Brexit-related loss is 50 times the UK Government’s estimate of the CPTPP gain, surely demonstrating that Ms Badenoch and her fellow Cabinet ministers have got their priorities all wrong.

Asked by Mr Byrne if the trade policy was to “go to where the growth is”, following her comments about the Indo-Pacific, Ms Badenoch replied: “That is not the entirety of it but that has been our focus because we have just left the European Union - making sure that we have a very clear signal about what we are doing independently. So some of that is going where the growth is, signing the free trade agreements, but it is also about strengthening alliances with many of the countries that perhaps, if you look at the various axes, may not necessarily be on the Western side.”

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When it was put to Ms Badenoch by Mr Byrne that it did not feel the UK Government was on track by the end of the current parliament to hit its target of having free trade agreements with countries covering 80% of UK trade, she replied: “The biggest thing that had an impact on us reaching that objective was the change in administration from President Trump to President Biden. We were carrying out negotiations for a US FTA but, when the administration changed, the Biden administration just is not doing FTAs.”

That is surely quite the “dog ate our homework” excuse.

There was, of course, always the prospect of a change in US administration.

Ms Badenoch declined to estimate a percentage of UK trade that might be covered by free trade agreements by the end of the current parliament, referring to her previous comment about FTAs being “not the only thing about this trade policy”.

Yet it was big, bold new free trade agreements that the Brexiters were banging on about so loudly around the time of the 2016 referendum.

And Ms Badenoch’s comment about “making sure that we have a very clear signal about what we are doing independently” surely really said it all about the form over substance presentational nonsense from the Brexit brigade.

Asked if a US deal was “dead” now, Ms Badenoch replied: “They have said they are not doing FTAs with anybody so it isn’t about us, despite a lot of the narrative that you might read in the press. It is just their strategy is not using free trade agreements - it’s more smaller packages on single issues. If you look at what they’re doing with us, with India, with Japan, it’s critical minerals or it’s semiconductors. That is how they are carrying out their trade policy and you have to work with that.

“In the same way that we don’t allow other countries to dictate what our strategy is, we have to work with what their strategy is, which is why we pivoted to MOUs (memorandums of understanding), which are informal agreements, they are not backed legally.”

A few things are worth observing here.

Ms Badenoch seemed rather desperate to claim in great detail that it is not just the UK being turned down for a free trade agreement.

And the MOUs amount to a hill of beans, surely, in the broader scheme of things.

What is more, a US trade deal would not deliver much of an economic boost to the UK anyway.

The Conservatives’ assessment of the free trade deal they were trying to do with the US, published in March 2020, was that such an agreement would boost UK GDP by around 0.07% or 0.16% on a 15-year horizon, under two different scenarios.

The OBR has of course given its estimate of the cost of Brexit.

And forecasts in November 2018 from the Theresa May government showed Brexit would, with an average free trade deal with the EU, result in UK GDP in 15 years’ time being 4.9% lower than if the country had stayed in the bloc if there were no change to migration arrangements. Or 6.7% worse on the basis of zero net inflow of workers from European Economic Area countries.

Returning to Ms Badenoch’s remarks about the lack of a US trade deal, we again have this seemingly defiant, and relatively meaningless, talk about not allowing “other countries to dictate what our strategy is”.

It was difficult to conclude this was anything other than a post-Brexit thumbing of the nose at the EU.

However, the Conservative Government has most certainly cut off its nose to spite its face when you look at the scale of the losses from Brexit, as outlined by the OBR and many others, and the tiny gains from new trade deals such as the CPTPP.