The usuals will try and diss this.

Those who predicted economic disaster from Brexit insisted that this was impossible. There was even an economic theory – the “gravity model” – used to suggest that we must cling to the EU. This is weak economics, and even worse history. Since the 18th century, Britain has been a pioneer global trader – the most outward-looking of European states. Even in the days of sail, our biggest single 19th-century export was cloth to India.



Victorian living standards were transformed by wheat from North America, beef from Argentina, lamb from New Zealand, butter from Australia. By joining the Common Market in 1973, we shifted away from global trade under the illusion that postwar Europe was permanently booming. Those wishing to push us back towards a Eurocentric trading system are harking back to the illusions of the 1950s.

The CPTPP is a recognition of a rapidly changing political as well as economic world. We are not the only European country to contemplate a “tilt” to the Asia-Pacific, as Asia resumes the position within the global economy that it occupied throughout most of human history. Both Germany and France have signalled the same shift. President Macron observed that “the 20th century was continental … the 21st will be oceanic. That is where the power and geopolitics of tomorrow are being played out.” He has theorised, but Britain has acted.



Our tilt is political and strategic as well as economic.