This CPTPP deal is like putting lipstick on a pig

Hurrah! Put out more flags! The UK has joined the Pacific free trade area called CPTPP and apparently, it is worth £12 trillion to the UK economy!

Well, that’s if you are silly enough to believe the front page of the Sunday Express and the barely credible claims of the government ministers involved and their cheerleaders in the Brexit corner. As someone on Twitter explained, this is like saying that you have 75 million girlfriends because you have joined Tinder.

The reality is of course nothing like that.

The laughable £12 trillion total touted by the government and repeated without question by their Express stooges is the total worth of the economies involved. Not the trade we do with them, not the opportunity for more trade that this deal opens up, not the profit on that extra trade – just the combined wealth of all the countries involved.

To put that in even more context, we already have trade deals with nine of the 11 members of the CPTPP. Remember those “great” deals with Australia and New Zealand? The ones so bad for the UK that they laughed at us? No? Well, they are already members of this block, so what the possible advantages are of doing another deal with them so soon it is difficult to see.

We also have a rather good post-Brexit trade deal with Japan, by far the largest member of this regional trade block. Oh, and if you are wondering how we managed to join a “regional” Pacific trading block it is because we are still owners and masters of the Pitcairn Islands. I am not joking about this.

So, this deal is basically two new trade deals with Malaysia and Brunei and slightly better ones with the rest. I am guessing that you are well ahead of me by now and are beginning to have doubts about the £12 trillion figure.

Good on you, because the government’s own figures put the worth at 0.08% of UK GDP over 10 years 0 or to put it another way, £1.8 billion over 10 years. Or to put it in its proper Brexit context, 50 or so more trade deals like this and we will be no worse off than if we had stayed in the EU. But even that is not the worst of it.

The 4% hit to the UK economy caused by Brexit was calculated by the Office for Budget Responsibility and is worked out by adding up all the benefits of leaving, including new trade deals and deducting all the costs – you know, like leaving the single market and becoming an international laughing stock.

So, the new trade deal is already calculated in this 4% figure. If we had not signed it we would be 4.08% poorer; now we are back to just a 4% drop as calculated – or probably even worse as those figures are being revised all the time by experts. The latest figures say that the damage is already more like 5.5% and climbing. But what do we care? We have a new trade deal with mighty Brunei!

The reason it costs so much to leave the EU and we gain so little from this deal is down to something called “gravity”. There are few certainties in economics, but the fact that countries do more trade with other countries that are close to them compared to countries that are on the other side of the world, is a given.

We also had not just a free trade agreement with the EU but we were members of the single market, meaning we had agreed to accept each other’s goods without exception because they all agreed to the same standards. This means our companies and supply chains are indelibly tied to the economies of Europe. We abandoned the East of Suez policy in the 1960s and it was massively out of date even then’ the idea that this deal can do anything to replace the EU is a joke.

To those like Andrew Neil who say that the CPTPP deal will be worth far more and that the 0.08% figure was a rather amateur calculation knocked together in 2013 and therefore hopelessly out of date, I have a few questions.

Are they seriously saying that the mighty British government has negotiated and signed a deal with no idea whatsoever of how much it is worth to the economy? It is extraordinary that a major economy should negotiate like that.

Or perhaps, HM Treasury, the Department of Business, the Foreign Office and the Department of International Trade have all got together and prepared a state-of-the-art economic evaluation of the benefits of CPTTP and we are all in for a bonanza of economic resurgence, higher productivity and more tax revenues than the government can possibly spend.

But if they have those magic numbers at their fingertips, why has the government not released them? Where are they? Why aren’t they on the front page of every paper?

I imagine they do exist but the government is keeping quiet about them for obvious reasons, if they were good we would all know about it.

This deal is like putting lipstick on a pig. At the end of the day, Brexit is still a pig.