We can’t trust Trump, so prioritising an EU trade deal is a no-brainer

The BBC’s headline on its interview with the chancellor made what she said sound vaguely controversial: “Reeves suggests UK trade with EU more important than US”.

In fact, Rachel Reeves’s statement was a no-brainer. We do more than 41% of our trade with the EU, another 5% with the EEA and Switzerland and just 13.5% with the United States. There is no “suggests” about it – it is absolute fact that for the UK, trading with Europe is more than 3 times more important to the UK than trade with America.

It tells you all you need to know about how sensitive No. 10 is about Brexit that it felt the need to “clarify” that the chancellor’s remarks had been “a statement of fact that the EU is our largest trading partner”. One explanation for Labour’s nerves could be found in Saturday’s Telegraph, which carried a front-page story saying that the chancellor’s comments came “despite data showing trade with America grew 10 times faster than with Brussels (sic) last year”.

This was followed by a ridiculous editorial which claims that the news of Reeves’s simple statement of facts (which even the Telegraph admits are true) will be greeted in Brussels with “ill-disguised delight at a British government apparently willing to hand over anything the EU asks for in exchange for a woefully lopsided deal”.

How you get from a simple statement of obvious facts to an act of abject surrender by a Quisling regime it is hard to understand. But then maybe the Brexiteers are just very sensitive about the damage they have done to our trade.

As Adam Posen famously said, the UK is the only country in history to have imposed a trade war on itself. Our trade with the EU has suffered hugely as a result, with red tape, checks, added costs and confusion over standards all piling on the misery. For the Telegraph, which backed Brexit and claimed it would cause no harm to business, to then turn round and say that our trade with the EU is not important because it is not growing quickly enough is shameless cynicism.

We also need to look at the other side of the calculation. What is a trade deal with Trump worth? The president has put a 10% tariff on all our exports to America, and a 25% tariff on cars, steel and aluminium; even if we can reduce those huge costs, we will be worse off than before. Maybe the Torygraph can tell us what tariffs the EU imposes on us, or how quickly our trade with the USA will now increase with those tariffs?

On top of that, Trump is the peesident who tore up NAFTA, the biggest trade deal his country has ever signed, and renegotiated “the best trade deal in history” to replace it. Then when re-elected he tore that one up and imposed tariffs on America’s neighbours.

Does anyone really think that means a UK/USA deal is worth having, one we can trust, one which will last? Leaving aside learning even the most basic level of diplomatic or trade knowledge or even realpolitik, I suggest the Brexiteers go back and relearn the maths they seem to have forgotten.

41 is bigger than 13.5 – it was when I was at school, and it still is. It really is that simple.