Milestone or inchpebble? The first UK ‘trade deal’ with a US state, Indiana

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MAY 29, 2022 | UPDATED MAY 31, 2022

“They said a US trade deal couldn’t be done. It can. We are doing it.”

That declaration by UK Minister of State for Trade Policy Penny Mordaunt is the headline on a piece she wrote on a partisan website to celebrate signing an agreement with the US state, Indiana.

But is it a “US trade deal”?

• It is not with the “US”, but Indiana — a state with 2% of the US population (at 6 million slightly more than Yorkshire or Scotland), less than 2% of the US economy (GDP), and less than 1% of its area (ranked 38th of the 50 US states)
• The actual “trade” content is minimal, when compared with what governments usually sign in trade agreements
• “Deal” is misleading since this is not the conclusion of anything. It’s a memorandum of understanding (MoU) — or joint statement of intent — on future cooperation and on what future talks will cover. The way it’s presented stretches the meaning of “agreement” a lot.

The phrase “trade deal” is itself a problem.

The UK’s rolled-over deals after the Brexit transition

UPDATE: On January 25, 2024, talks between Canada and the UK broke down — paused by the UK — over issues such as Canadian tariff quotas for UK cheese, rules of origin for UK cars post-Brexit (affecting duty-free rights) and sanitary conditions for Canadian beef in the UK (not about hormones as in some reports but “about carcass washes used in Canadian processing facilities” according to Janyce McGregor of CBC.

The result was that the Canada-UK deal was an incomplete “roll-over” of the Canada-EU trade agreement. See “UK walks away from trade talks with Canada” (CBC)

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JANUARY 1, 2021 | UPDATED JANUARY 26, 2024

On January 1, 2021, Britain left the EU Single Market and customs union. That meant the EU’s free trade agreements with non-EU countries no longer applied to the UK.

The British government has negotiated, at speed, “roll-over” agreements with those non-EU countries in order to reproduce the effects of those agreements as much as possible so that continuity is maximised for UK business.

This article does not look at the contents or depth of the deals. It simply counts how many of the EU’s free trade agreements have been “rolled over” into continuity agreements with the UK, and how many have not been done.

‘No deal’ on UK-EU trade is worse than ‘Australia-style’

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED NOVEMBER 30, 2020 | UPDATED DECEMBER 1, 2020

As the risk of failure in the UK- EU talks on their future relationship increases towards the end of the Brexit transition, the British government is trying to disguise “no deal” as if it were some kind of deal.

What Brexiters used to call a “WTO deal”, is now “An Australia-type relationship” in coordinated messaging from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his Cabinet, and his supporters in Parliament. Among the latest is Environment and Farming Secretary George Eustice. He of all people should know better.

What have the UK and Switzerland agreed on trade post-Brexit?

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED FEBRUARY 5, 2019 | UPDATED JANUARY 27, 2021

A summary of this is on the EU Relations Law blog, here

What have the UK and Switzerland agreed on their trade relationship post-Brexit? Essentially, they have been partly “rolling over” to the UK the present Swiss-EU trade relationship.

EU agreements are being “rolled over” into UK agreements in order to allow as much continuity as possible for trade and for business. They are called “continuity agreements”.

Below are an introduction to the provisions on goods and services, followed by Swiss government summaries of key parts of its agreements with the UK, mainly on goods but also narrowly on services.

But first, some context and explanations.