The UK should rekindle its ‘global spirit’ and come out of the customs union, says Boris Johnson
Rekindling a “global spirit” is imperative if Britain wants to strike trade deals with “dynamic” countries across the globe, Boris Johnson has said.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph after a visit to Chile, Argentina and Peru, Johnson said Britain had been guilty of neglecting South America ever since it joined the Common Market, when it became “more Eurocentric and less instinctively global”.
He said there was a correlation between that moment and the fact that the continent – “full of countries and peoples whose values are so close to our own – makes up a pitiful share of our trade”.
Johnson lamented that he was the first foreign secretary to visit Peru in 50 years, and Argentina and Chile in 25, in spite of the fact that all three countries were “full of Anglophiles” and had “a keen and growing appetite for all things British”.
The foreign secretary echoed the poet John Keats in saying there were realms of gold to be discovered in South America – but only if the UK was prepared to go the whole way and leave the customs union after Brexit.
“Our Latin American partners are emphatic: if this is to work, we must come fully out of the EU customs union,” he warned.
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The Prime Minister is currently straddling two customs union options on exiting the EU. The first, the customs partnership, would see Britain stick closely to the EU’s customs regime and collect tariffs on behalf of Brussels. Johnson called the plan “crazy” and backbench MP Jacob Rees-Mogg denounced it as “completely cretinous”.
The second option, “Max Fac”, [maximum facilitation] has been promoted by Brexiteers as a way to manage the Irish border through technology and without remaining in a customs union, which they argue would limit the UK’s ability to conduct its own trade policy.
Johnson said the UK should take note of the problems in the countries he visited, where there were divisions over Mercosur, a customs union comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and the Pacific Alliance, involving Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile that operate their own trade policies.
“I will not enter into South American controversy except to say that I heard plenty of grumbles against the one-size-fits-all tariffs of Mercosur … and there is absolute unanimity that if we are to be a valid trading partner, then we must take back control – as the PM has said – of our tariff schedules, and do deals that are unhindered and uncomplicated.
“If we get it right, the opportunities are vast,” he said.
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