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Comment by EForEndeavour | Hacker News Reader

The EU comprises roughly half of the UK's total trade activity [0], making this attitude of "plenty of other places to export stuff outside the EU" seem rather overconfident. Why would the UK consider compliance with the entity that generates half their trade "optional"?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

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It is not "the UK" that manufactures and exports things, it's people living there. Some of these people will want to target the EU as a market, some won't. For those that won't, following the EU regulations is now optional.

is it really surprising that most exports/imports ended up being from/to the EU when the trading environment (customs union, tarriffs, regulation) is all but designed to prioritise to internal EU trade at the expense of the rest of the world?

post-brexit: the rest of the world will be on a more even footing, so this will likely change

It was not “at the expense of the rest of the world”.

The EU is a protectionist trade bloc like any other and imposes tariffs and quotas on trade with countries outside the bloc accordingly.

It is. Membership of the Customs Union makes it so. Agricultural tariffs especially. As we are not in the Customs Union any more, it will be interesting to see what the Customs Schedule for things that UK does not grow but likes to import looks like compared with the Union tariff.

https://www.gov.uk/look-up-import-tariffs-1-january-2021

You can look stuff up here. Lots of things are, as you'd expect, reduced but some things surprisingly high still.

If that were true then where are all the non EU trade deals? The UK gave a clear sign that it is going to leave the EU so it was in a clear position to negotiate trade deals outside the EU ahead of Brexit. Yet it failed to do so.

We have a bunch, but they are mainly continuity agreements at this point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_agreements_of_the_Unit...

Remember though that an average trade deal takes longer to negotiate than the time we have legally had to negotiate them so far. It is likely that in the next 5 or so years we will get an agreement with the USA, CPTPP and India.

There are winners and losers of any trade deal as mentioned in this thread. Some UK sectors will probably carry on with the EU business as usual, others will abandon the EU and search for better arrangements with other parties.

The question you posed assumes that the EU will continue to be involved with half of the UK's trading activity, which I don't buy.

> The question you posed assumes that the EU will continue to be involved with half of the UK's trading activity, which I don't buy.

The difficult bit to buy, hard as Brexiters have been selling it, is that the reduction in the proportion of trading activity with the EU will be compensated for by an increase in trading activity with countries which are further away, more protectionist and/or poorer, as opposed to just a reduction in trade overall.

It’s more than just exports.

Regulations, imports from the EU, taxes paid to the EU, and tourists to and from the EU are also part of the equation. So the UK might be better off outside the EU when you ignore trade.

Having said that, offsetting some of the drop in EU exports with and increase in non EU exports seems likely and could allow for a net benefit even assuming a net drop in total exports.

"When you ignore trade" is a pretty spectacular caveat for assessing the claimed economic benefits from not participating in a trade agreement.

We've had several years to hear a concrete argument for what regulations need removing and what the benefits would be, and the best we got was Patrick Minford's ambitious "it's likely we would eliminate manufacturing" growth projections based on the assumption the UK removed all barriers to importing anything. Ironically the EU has made more progress in securing FTAs with our list of putative alternative trade partners...

I wasn’t ignoring trading, I am simply saying that looking at trade in isolation isn’t the full story. People suggesting that an increase in non EU trade must be equivalent to the decrease in EU trade may be ignoring what the other side is saying.

It’s possible for the increase to exist, it to be less than the loss, and for the UK to be better off. As such some people talking about the likely increase may not be implying it’s a 1:1 replacement for the drop.

Sure, but the burden of the extraordinary claim that a particular set of reforms impossible under the EU could be more valuable than trade with the EU falls on those making it.

Sure, EU trade isn’t going to zero. So I think that comes down to a case by case argument.

Generally being part of a larger market is the best option, but individual executions are clearly going to be argued about endlessly.

> Some UK sectors will probably carry on with the EU business as usual, others will abandon the EU and search for better arrangements with other parties

Those sectors could always have chosen to abandon trading with the EU to find better arrangements.

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