Chief trade negotiator: UK had little influence before Brexit vote

The man in charge of leading the government’s global trade negotiations has told Sky News that the UK “had very little influence on the international trade system” before voting to leave the European Union.

Crawford Falconer, the UK’s chief trade negotiation adviser since 2017, said that the UK had “very little to say” on trade when he took over his job. However, he claimed that things were now “changing rapidly and will change ever more rapidly”.

However, others have cast doubt over Mr Falconer’s bullish air. Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform and a member of the government’s Strategic Trade Advisory Group, told Sky News that trade policy remained “in a state of flux” and that he was “not sure it’s true” to say that Britain’s influence had grown.

Mr Lowe said: “The UK right now is not viewed as a bastion of free trade. Brexit is viewed as protectionism – we’re putting up barriers to trade with our biggest market. There’s some hope that the UK might move into this role in the future, but to be honest, until the relationship with the EU is settled, people are just holding their breath.”

Mr Falconer was previously New Zealand’s ambassador to the World Trade Organisation, and served on a series of WTO dispute panels. He has a global reputation as a trade negotiator, which is why he was recruited to the civil service two years ago.

For the past 45 years, the UK has relied on the European Union to strike trade deals around the world but after Brexit the country is likely to have its own trading policy. Mr Falconer’s task will be to lead Britain in its negotiations.

He said: “I always found it anomalous from the outside that the world’s fifth largest economy, as the UK has always been, really had very little to say, very little influence on the international trade system.

“I wasn’t surprised, I knew that that was the de-facto case but that will change and has changed already. To me that change was self-evident and to everyone else I worked with from around the world. And that is changing rapidly now and will change ever more rapidly.”

Mr Falconer is overseeing a programme teaching hundreds of Whitehall officials the skills needed to frame trade policy and lead negotiations, telling me that hundreds were being actively trained while around 3,000 had enrolled in the programme. He is also behind a new scheme to recruit newcomers to the department to be employed as the trade negotiators of the future.

“I’m not worried about a shortage in the future – the interest is there,” he said. ” What this programme does is plan for the next state – retention. It’s about saying that this will not be a one or two-year wonder, but this will be decades for the UK.

“It’s not just about finding negotiators but also working with private sector onshore and offshore to promote the UK’s interests. It’s about investing in people.

“The best idea is the one that the Jesuits first thought of a long time ago – get them young… send them a message that it’s not exclusive – it’s not a priesthood of experts – it’s something that ordinary people who have experience can pick up and convey.”

His enthusiasm has been backed by the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, who said he wanted to inspire applicants from all walks of life to see trade as a “highly desirable career option”. His department says it is the first in the world to create an international trade training scheme – those who join the scheme will be paid more than £30,000 and be given placements around the world.

But Mr Lowe told Sky News that Britain was “still in a state of flux” over trade policy and added that “I’m not sure that it would be true to say that the UK has become more influential since Brexit”.

He added: “To the outside observer, it looks like we’ve been caught up in the Trump wave, where we are putting up barriers to trade rather than pulling them down. But it’s not to say that were the UK to embrace the role of liberalising that we couldn’t play a constructive role in the future.”

(c) Sky News 2019: Chief trade negotiator: UK had little influence before Brexit vote