Three related articles.

1. There was an interesting article on page 15 of today’s City AM, I can’t find the text of the article online, but you can find a pdf here.

The headline was “Britain doesn’t need a special trade deal to boost trade with the US” and the upshot was that the businesses in the UK and the US manage to buy and sell a huge volume of goods and services from each other, despite the fact that there is no ‘free trade deal’ between the US and the UK (qua EU Member State). The author gives half a dozen examples of particular restrictions which could be lifted on one side or the other, and concludes:

There’s so much that can be done if both sides build on the strong foundations which already exist. Prioritising that rather than attempting a brand new FTA from scratch won’t limit the scale of what we can achieve.”

A good point. All-encompassing trade deals can take years to negotiate, because dozens of special interests on each side will hold the whole thing to ransom, so it’s better to do it a bit at a time on an ad hoc basis.

(My caveat is that the author is Ben Digby, the CBI’s International Director, and the CBI are Hard Remain, so they might be a bit biased, but fact is, we buy and sell a lot more from businesses in EU Member States than in the USA, so fair enough.)

2. The Daily Mash made a perfectly valid point with their article headed “If you don’t want to eat chlorinated chicken, you could always just read the f***ing label, say experts.”

3. I Tweeted the Mash article and @TraderPaulFX replied that most veg and salad in the UK are washed in chlorine. A quick Google indicates this to be correct, see e.g. here.