citricsquid
Well-Known Forumite
i dont think it will take as long as people fear. we currently have a trade agreement with the eu. the hole thing doesn't need to be negotiated on just the bits we disagree on. i see 2 years being long enough as it is in nether side interest to prolong the negotiations.
The EU negotiate (using their some ~550 trade negotiators) trade deals for the union, then each member of the union is covered under those trade deals. Leaving the EU means we won't be covered by those trade deals any more; we could say to each country "please can we have the same deal that you gave to the EU?" but because the UK is much smaller than the EU we won't be "worth" such favourable terms, so it's unlikely any country will just give us the same deal they've given to the EU and so lots of negotiating will need to happen. We could ask to keep the same trade deal within the union (trading with France for example) but that doesn't cover many countries we trade with. Trade deals can take many many years to negotiate, experts on trade negotiation have said it could take at least a decade.
Worth noting also that the UK does not have any trade negotiators... as a member of the EU we don't need them, so not only do we need to negotiate these deals, we need to hire a lot of people to do it. The director of the Vote Leave campaign Dominic Cummings said this:
Q: How do you think our trade arrangements with the rest of the world will evolve if we leave the EU?
Cummings says the UK will get a seat on the WTO and have the ability to negotiate its own trade deals.
Q: Does the civil service have the ability to negotiate these deals?
Cummings says there are huge problems with the way Whitehall works. He would not be confident with the Foreign Office negotiating anything.
These guys can’t negotiate their way out of a paper bag.
So in the short term there would be a problem.
Q: So relying on them to negotiate new trade deals is a bit of a stretch?
Cummings says this is part of a broader problem. It would be wrong to think leaving the EU will solve all our problems.
Generally speaking, the training of civil servants is “appalling”, he says.