Peter Foster
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Jun
Peter Foster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the EU is trying to create a world where EU-based manufacturers in autos, in energy, in key supply chains, chemicals get preferential access to EU subsidy schemes.
Now the UK, fifty percent odd of its trade is done with the EU, is worried that if it's not treated as if it's European, then its automakers and chemical firms and nuclear
to energy providers are gonna find themselves shut out of those supply chains.
And so the EU goes, well, okay, that's fine, but you remember you left the EU and you're outside the EU single market.
You don't wanna have free movement of people.
So in that case, it's a bit difficult to make you part of the family if you're not gonna follow the family rules.
Well, here's the rub.
Since Brexit, one of the advantages of Brexit was the UK had its own trade policy.
And so, for example, back in 2024, the EU put tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles of up to forty-five percent, depending on where they came from.
The UK didn't do that, which meant that Chinese EVs came into the UK cheaper and more easily.
And so the UK is in the process of trying to, for example, get the Chinese
auto firms to invest uh and do tie ups with some of the UK based firms and UK based plants.
So, you know, the the price of entry to the EU's Made in Europe scheme is that we've got to put tariffs up on the Chinese, then that's a problem for our relations with China.
I think the short answer to that is probably not.
One UK official said to me, It's difficult to say that we want to be inside part of Fortress Europe for the Made in Europe scheme, and yet have trade policy, trade defence measures that appear to undermine that fortress.
There is frustration, I think, in Brussels that the UK, on the one hand, is asking for this exemption to be treated as if it's European and yet isn't really yet prepared to follow the
logic of that request, which is, well, in that case, you're gonna have to harmonize your trade defense measures with the EU's.
I think what it says about Brexit's promise is that it's getting harder and harder to deliver.
If you go back to twenty twenty when the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his big speech about buccaneering Britain uh in the Greenwich Observatory, he promised a world in which the UK would be in the vanguard of free trade.
But since twenty twenty what we've seen is the US, China and the EU put up their trade barriers.
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