Is that all there is?

Canada and the United Kingdom have announced a new trade deal to govern economic relations between the two countries once the UK-EU transition period ends on January 1. Bizarrely, the deal was announced on Saturday, via an international Zoom call featuring Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and their respective trade ministers.  The timing was presumably set to coincide with the G-20 summit hosted by Saudi Arabia over the weekend. 

Johnson's trade minister, Liz Truss, is certainly all in on the deal, writing in the Daily Telegraph (behind a paywall, sorry!) that it will allow the UK to change the world. That seems just slightly exaggerated. What has actually been agreed is that the terms of the existing EU-Canada trade deal, CETA, will be extended bilaterally by the UK and Canada once the transition period ends. It is simply the status quo, in other words, although the two countries will now embark on negotiations that may lead to a "bespoke" agreement at some point in the future.

The deal with Canada comes just a month after the UK scored its first post-Brexit bilateral deal, with Japan. The UK government, with Ms Truss again front-and-centre,  celebrated this deal by crowing that it would allow UK consumers to pay less for soy sauce, only to have it pointed out that soy sauce already attracted a zero tariff under the existing EU-Japan trade deal. As with the Canada deal, the UK's "new" deal with Japan is in effect just a rollover of the existing trade agreement with the EU, though with the addition of a new chapter on digital trade. It is expected to boost UK GDP by.....0.07 percent. 

This, then, is how the UK's trade relations are shaping up as it exercises the independence it has supposedly regained by leaving the EU. Trade with important but geographically distant countries like Canada and Japan will continue on almost exactly the same basis as before: no country can be expected to afford the UK a better deal than it affords the much larger EU bloc. UK trade with the larger and much closer EU, by contrast, will take place on significantly worse terms than at present -- possibly even on WTO terms, if last-ditch efforts to come up with a deal fall short. This is not what voters were promised back in 2016 when they voted for Brexit, and it is now too imminent and concrete a prospect to be written off as "Project Fear".

There may be no real economic benefit to the UK from these deals, but Boris Johnson may well have other things in mind. With deals in place with two G-7 countries, it will be easier for Boris Johnson to place the blame on the "intransigent" EU if those last-minute trade negotiations fail. In Brexit world, that blame game seems to be all that counts.