Lost for Words wrote:

You support Labour - not their looney left, but a part which clearly values a "social" aspect. You see larger government and laws as the best way to control various issues. You're supportive of a higher rate of tax and take great issue with legal tax avoidance. You're obviously very keen on the EU taking the view that it its interventions and "harmonisations" are for the better. Clearly you aren't anti-business, but you are less inclined to let market forces take their course than I. All that fits perfectly with a mindset that your opinion is not being heard unless it is in a controlled manner and at other times things just have to/should be accepted.

Wow.... you are almost correct....you should buy a couch for me to lie on.

Still sad that you continue to confuse the prominence I place on minutiae issue of a tailgate and the bearing that consumers can have on it's design and production after the fact ...compared to what I worry about with wider life issues that profoundly impact on society. Bizarre.

LT wrote:

Lost for Words wrote:

LT wrote:

Before the referendum, I must have spent half a dozen or so hours reading about trade agreements. I sought out articles by authors who weren't political and had no agenda. Some of them were dated prior to the last general election.

The overwhelming factor was how complex and time consuming these deals were. I gave up before I really understood quite why they should take so long to come to fruition.

People pussy-foot around. If everyone were just frank with each other and just set out their own lines and let each other decide, it would be much easier.

That's why we should just say, "These are what we'll accept into the country, and these are what we have to offer you". Then other nations do the same, and where these interests match, we trade. There should be no twisting people's arms, no payments, no enforcement - all of these things mean false economies.

This is my view on roughly what we should do: We take everything in house and work with any willing countries to lay down their requirements and discuss regulations to identify equivalents - with our regulatory demands kept to a minimum. There's no body of enforcement, only voluntary agreements between nations that allow each nation to set out their customs laws to suit. Anyone would be able to arrange or take part in the ratification of acceptable standards - done either by agreements with other governments, or by our own government acting abroad to grant approvals, or arrangements with the private sector directly with importers and exporters (i.e. you pay/contribute to prove conformity and you can import).

We then trade tariff free with any country on any goods that have been deemed to meet acceptable regulatory requirements, regardless or not of whether the other countries choose to impose tariffs at their end. We apply these requirements at our end with strong customs enforcement. We take resposibility for the goods and services in our country, rather than try to make others do it for us. As an aside, any consequently non-profitable sectors that we should still wish to retain could be supported as a service/investment instead - simply paid for by the gains of free trade, as opposed to the use of protectionist tariffs.

I agree, sadly that's not the case though and these deals are closely guarded and take literally years (5+).

That's why we have to do the legwork and make it easy for everyone else, and why we need to approach with a default of free trade rather than seeking out individual deals and only lowering our tariffs once done. We just need to ditch our silly foibles and stop playing tit for tat tariffs.

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