A few days ago the Conservative Party published a short video message pointing out that our exporting trade with India and China has grown by 20% over the last year. This prompted me to check out the latest Office for National Statistics website which at the bottom of this page displays a list of every country we have sold or bought goods from and the value of these. Whilst our services demand inclusion if one was to look at the economy as a whole, nevertheless this set of figures provides a great deal of interesting data.

Rather than simply looking at either the EU or the non EU nations as if they were at polarised in the same way as many opinions, if one takes the top 10 nations that we export to and import from, the overall proportion of our trading is in excess of 62% of our total trading arrangements. Whilst 62% does not precisely fit the 80/20 rule to focus on the top 10 nations would make a great deal of sense if our Government was to play an active approach.

Of these ten nations there are three that are outside of the EU and outside of any current EU trading arrangements. They are USA which is our top exporting nation by a margin of 72% compared to the next largest nation (Germany). China which is the sixth largest exporting nation and second after Germany of the nations we import from. Finally Hong Kong which is the 9th largest export nation and the thirteenth largest source of imports. Taken alone they offer us a current 19% of imports and 23% of exports. If we added to these three the next 7 largest non EU nations that also don’t have free trading arrangements with the EU and the total based on last year would have been 24% and 29% of our total imports and exports.

Clearly if we could treble the amounts of trade with all ten of these or the top three, then our position would be very different, although we would still be foolish to ignore the European trading potential. However it is clear that tripling or even doubling the trade of goods is something that cannot be done easily or quickly and damaging our trading arrangements with any of these current top 10 nations which includes Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Italy and Poland would make no sense at all. What this brief and basic analysis suggests is that our nation needs to find a way of retaining and indeed strengthening its trading arrangements with all 10 of these nations, while at the same time growing its trade with the other 180 or so nations across the Globe. The irony is that all three of the non EU nations have been ensconced in trade talks with the EU for many years and in due course may move things forward thereby allowing the EU members to increase their trading levels.