Most Favoured Nation: Is the UK-Australia FTA a Bad Deal?

[for the UK]

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A cow.

Last week the former UK environment minister, George Eustice, stood up in Parliament and gave both barrels to the UK-Australia free trade agreement [that he ostensibly supported while in government].

See Lewis’s thread for all of the drama:

Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall

Fmr Environment Sec George Eustice has spoken about the post-Brexit UK/Australia trade deal in the Commons. He says now no longer a minister: "I no longer have to put such a positive gloss on what was agreed...the Australia deal is not actually a very good trade deal for the UK."

Now it was no secret that Eustice’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and then Truss’s Department for International Trade (DIT) did not see eye-to-eye during the UK-Australia FTA negotiations.

DEFRA went out of its way to ensure that the UK did as little liberalisation on food as possible, but was eventually overruled when then-PM Boris Johnson and then-cabinet minister David Frost walked into a room with then-Australian PM Scott Morrison and said “yes” to pretty much everything the Australians asked for in order to get the deal over the line.

But why turn on the deal now? In main it is because the recent UK approach to free trade agreements [modus operandi: give negotiating partner everything they ask for on agriculture] is starting to get raised on the doorstep when Conservative politicians [particularly in the South-West of England] go out knocking, and not in a good way. Also, I kinda get why Eustice needed to get this off his chest. Earlier this year I spoke on a panel at the National Farmers Union’s annual conference, directly after Eustice had taken a Q&A from a room full of angry farmers. It was pretty brutal … and all the more so given everyone there knew his heart wasn’t in it.

But anyway, ignoring all of the drama [which is hard, because it’s mildly entertaining], his intervention does raise an important question: is the UK-Australia FTA a bad deal for the UK?