“Our destiny is not with Europe but India” blared a headline in today’s Telegraph, above a column by Andrew Lilico, the devoted europhobe and Trussite.
“Europe is not the UK’s future,” wrote Lilico, because “ultimately, the UK has reach and interests that extend far beyond Europe”.
And though Keir Starmer might be showing off about his shiny new trade deal with India, the credit is in fact due to… yes, you guessed it!
“Negotiations have been going on for several years,” writes Lilico, “having begun back in the period when Liz Truss was trade secretary.”
It was Liz wot won it! And what will this great, Truss-powered deal mean for poor old cash-strapped Britain? A quick trip over to the Department for Trade website reveals that this new India agreement “is expected to increase UK GDP (gross domestic product) by £4.8bn”.
When you put that figure alongside Britain’s current total GDP of £2.5 trillion, it turns out that the deal’s economic benefit for Britain amounts to around one fifth of one percentage point of GDP, which in economic terms is what’s known as “a rounding error”.
But this should not distract from the fact that the agreement is “potentially the most significant UK trade deal, so far, enabled by Brexit,” writes Lilico, a verdict that is as about as damning as it gets. It should of course be remembered that Brexit reduced the size of the UK economy by roughly 5%, a fact that Lilico ignores.
He also ignores the small fact that India has just fired rockets into Pakistan – is that the act of a reliable trade partner of the kind Lilico thinks Britain needs? But then, what does the potential outbreak of war between two nuclear-armed states matter when there’s a minuscule Brexit benefit to hop up and down about?
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