Well for one thing it's much more than a trade deal, it is an opportunity for the United
States and Europe to align themselves more closely and to revive the transatlantic relationship.
Also it's an opportunity for the United States and Europe that together account for 50 percent
of world gross domestic product to set the rules as it were for international trade for
a very long time to come while they are still in a position to do so, and thirdly it is
of course a very big trade deal which will boost the prosperity of the two sides of the
Atlantic which will generate further trade and which will be very helpful to the rest
to the world as well because of the new markets it will open up for them.
Well I think at the moment the biggest hurdle is that it has rather lost momentum, that
in the United States it's rather overshadowed by the arguments in the build-up to the midterm
elections and in Europe you've got the European Parliament elections and the European Commission
reaching the end of its life, so that at the present time there's a loss of momentum.
I think too that there's not been enough effort on the part of governments, and I mean governments
rather than the European Commission, to sell this to their electorates.
I don't think that a lot of people in the in the parts of public opinion both here and
on the other side of the Atlantic understand the great potential that there is, and it
seems like something which is just for big business and just very highfalutin figures,
and not something which would affect that cost of goods in the shops and the choice
of goods in the shops and the opportunities that small and medium-size businesses stand
to gain.
Well I think that there's a very important window of opportunity after the US midterm
elections, after the European Parliament elections, after the new European Commission comes in.
There's then a two-year window between those events and the US presidential election and
I think that if the bones of the agreement aren't reached in that window it will be very
difficult indeed for the negotiations to reach a successful conclusion.
It is isn't that you fall off a cliff, it is that once negotiations of this sort drag
on for too long they sort of go into the sand, so those two years are going to be very important.
I think it's also important to understand that we're not just talking about an event,
we're not talking about something which happens and then it's finished, we're talking about
an agreement which will have certainly within it understandings and agreements about specific
things but will also be the start of a process whereby objectives will be set over a period
of years, a framework will be there in which the negotiations will take place, in that
sense it is somewhat analogous to the creation of the European single market, it's a rolling
programme, it starts with a set of agreements and there are then agreements reached according
to time tables, and within a framework, over a period of years.
Well a very important message is the cost to failure, this is a deal which has huge
potential benefits, if the opportunity is lost now it won't return perhaps for a generation
and by then the whole structure of the world economy will be very different from what it
is now, so we want people to understand that if this opportunity is not grabbed now it
will be something which will have disappeared for some time to come.
We want the government to be much more active in seeking to generate support from our allies
in Europe, and also to generate support amongst public opinion in this country.
We want to draw attention to the fact that this is not just a matter for big companies
and big business, it's not just a matter of rather large abstract figures about what will
happen to the rate of growth the economy, it's something which can really benefit the
consumer by lowering prices in the shops, or at any rate insuring that prices are not
as high as they would otherwise have been, by widening choice.
We also want to get across the fact that this is not just a matter of tariffs, this is also
a matter of the numerous non-tariff barriers to trade which if they were removed would
be of great benefit to the small and medium-size businesses that at present sometimes wonder
what it's all about.