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EU Membership: Economic Benefits

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Trade deals take place because they are in the mutual interests of both parties; they are not military conflicts. They take place between two parties, like trade itself.

A very plausible but incorrect argument is that trade agreements always take a long time. When the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs was asked whether Ministers had done any study of trade agreements, he sidestepped the question. A freedom of information request has actually revealed that neither the Treasury nor the Government have done any study of the trade agreements about which they talk so knowledgeably. However, such studies have been done. I refer to the study by Professor Moser of the Centre of European Union Studies in Salzburg of every single trade agreement in the past 20 years. There are 88 of them. They took an average of 28 months, but the time for each varied greatly. The deals that took a long time were those that involved lots of countries, which certainly concurs with my experience. Of course, by definition any EU treaty involves 28 countries and takes a long time, because all 28 have vetoes. A lot of EU treaties are being held up now, but bilateral treaties take less than that average of 28 months. We should not start deluding people into thinking that it will take a long time to negotiate bilateral deals with countries that already have bilateral deals with Switzerland, for example.

The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam asked rhetorically whether anyone was queueing up for trade deals with us. Well, look not for what they say but what they do. Switzerland has trade deals with countries whose total GDP is four times that of the countries with which the EU has trade deals. Chile has trade deals with countries whose collective GDP is even bigger. Switzerland has a trade deal with China. We are told that it is a bad deal for Switzerland, but clearly the Swiss did not think so. The Swiss published the details of the deal online; Members can look at it themselves. By the time the EU even gets around to negotiating a trade deal with China—which by the way will never succeed because the EU will always insist on human rights terms the Chinese will not accept—the Swiss will have zero tariffs on the vast majority of their exports to China.