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Bringing my next guest now, delighted to say I'm joined by the Conservative peer, Lord Daniel Hannan
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Welcome to the show, Lord Hannan. A pleasure to have your company
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You read a great piece today about the trade deal potential between the UK and the US
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and your belief that Sir Keir Starmer seems wedded to Brussels and that could be to the detriment of the UK trade deal. Tell us more
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Yes, I mean, we already have a trade deal with Brussels, Martin, as you very well know
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and it's a very comprehensive one. It's the most inclusive and wide-ranging deal that the EU has
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ever signed with any country that isn't either a member or about to become a member. We do not
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have such a deal with the US, and the US is our single biggest trading partner. We sell as much
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to the US as to our second, third and fourth markets put together. So that's the big opportunity
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The trouble is that it would be a much more ambitious deal and a much more lucrative deal
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for both sides if we were free to set our own regulations across the board And this is why it very alarming to read that the government is going to give the EU a permanent and open right to set our food standards
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Not agreeing on a case-by-case basis where we think there's economies of scale, that's fine
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but giving somebody else a permanent right. Well, who's going to want to do a serious trade deal
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with a country that does that? And in a nutshell, Lord Hernan
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do you think this is a baby step towards rejoining? It's a way of just getting closer to Brussels step by step
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Do you know, I actually don't. I mean, I think that Labour has had to go through a bit of a learning process since they came into office
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They definitely wanted to rejoin in opposition. But when you look at now how they're talking about regulation of artificial intelligence
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where the EU is going in a very backward direction and we're not joining them, or gene editing or indeed trade on non-agricultural things
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I think they are learning that government is not as simple as they thought it was from the outside, and that going back in would involve a cost that is going to be intolerable, even to our officials, let alone to our population in a referendum
