“Since Brexit, Britain has been able to strike new free trade deals with 70 countries worth over £760billion, according to the Government.”
The Express has repeated a misleading claim about Britain’s trade deals, despite having already amended a previous article which made the same claim, after being approached by Full Fact.
The Express wrote: “Since Brexit, Britain has been able to strike new free trade deals with 70 countries worth over £760billion, according to the Government.”
As we previously reported, this figure refers to the total value of the trade in 2020 between the UK and countries with which it has a trade deal—not the additional value of the deals themselves, which will be much less.
Many of these essentially rolled over existing trade deals the UK had as a member of the EU.
Full Fact contacted the Express after it first published this claim in November 2021, and it issued a clarification.
The article also makes several other misleading claims about trade.
It claims that a report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) says that if the UK joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), tariffs would be slashed on 99.9% of goods.
The CPTPP is a trade bloc of 11 countries which counts Japan, Mexico, Canada and Australia among its members.
However, the CPS noted that 85.4% of UK exports are already eligible for tariff-free access to the bloc. So joining the CPTPP would result in tariffs being lowered on 14.5% not 99.9% of goods.
The Express also reported that joining the CPTPP has the “potential to boost GDP by up to £20billion a year.”
What it doesn’t explain is that this figure is based on government analysis which assumes South Korea, Thailand and the United States also joined the CPTPP. The US joining would provide by far the most substantial boost to UK GDP.
While Thailand and South Korea have indicated they wish to join the CPTPP, in November, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the CPTPP “is not something that America would be part of at this time”
If just South Korea and Thailand joined the CPTPP, the government estimates the UK’s annual GDP could increase by £5.5 billion in the long run from also joining the bloc.
By comparison, the UK’s GDP in 2020 was around £2 trillion.
Image courtesy of Guillaume Bolduc, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}