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Hello my name is Graham Hughes from the 3 blokes in a pub podcast and I've been asked to make a video about the World Trade Organisation because a lot of people have been erroneously saying that we can go to no deal go to World Trade
Organisation rules and everything will be okay.
So what I want this video to be is a bit of an explosion of these myths about the WTO. I'm just gonna give you the facts about them and the facts of where we stand at the moment
in terms of the WTO and what it means for Britain for the future of Britain for our trading position and our political position in the world.
So first of all number one something I want to make really clear. Nobody trades
on World Trade Organisation rules alone.
Gotta understand that the World Trade Organisation rules are a base minimum. They like that the least you can do. They like the Geneva Convention on weapons. After the Second World
War it was agreed not to use lasers and gas to kill people but you can still use cluster bombs and landmines I suppose. So basically it's not a foundation for trading in any terms of deals. It's just to make sure that no one can
take the mickey too much. You can't. For instance if you're importing cheese from the United Kingdom into your country you can't just slap on a 400 percent tariff on all British cheese because that would be against the World Trade
Organisation minimum maximum tariffs that you're allowed to set.
So first of all let me just say as well about this that the UK some people have said that the UK won't be able to be part of the WTO it will have to reapply
for membership. That's not true. The 146 members of the WTO Britain is a member in its own right. It was a member back in the days when it was GATT it was invented in the 40s in the 1990s it became the WTO. Essentially it's it's
it's a club where people get together and say let's work on deals and this is the thing we leave without a deal the EU than all of our deals with the rest of the world as well. They also stop and this will be absolutely crippling
for the United Kingdom because what will happen is we will put in our schedule of tariffs into the WTO as we are allowed to do and then any of the other members can object to them and it can take years and years and years for a
schedule to be ratified in fact ratification. I think for the for the Russians took about 18 years so it can take a long long time. And that's just for you your basics. But let's go on to what tariffs actually are. Okay. So number
two tariffs do not go both ways. There are things called tariffs. They are taxes on things that you buy from other countries. So if I want to buy some dairy products from China. The British government might put on a tariff on that
might put a tax on that because they don't want me to buy dairy products from China. They want me to buy dairy products from the local farmer down the road to keep the local farmer in business. This is why tariffs exist. It's all
protectionism of your own industry you have tariffs on cars you have tyrants on electronic goods you have times on all kinds of stuff. The whole point of the WTO existing is so we have deals on these tariffs but when we talk about
going to WTO bare bones minimum factory resets we're essentially saying we are going to set the maximum possible tariffs on the under the World Trade Organisation rules for instance on Welsh lamb those maximum tariffs are 40 percent
and as 90 percent of Welsh lamb goes is exported. That's just going to decimate Welsh farming. What Western decimate crush Wales farming lamb farming because sheep exist in other countries it's not like they have a monopoly on
on lambs existing. The tariff on cars and car parts for instance is nine point eight percent. So if you make a car in the UK and you try and sell it to someone in France Germany or whatever they're going to have to pay an extra
10 percent on it if we leave without a deal because they'll just revert back to the maximum then we have to start negotiating getting that deal back down to what it is at the moment which is zero.
And this is one of the
main things that I just want to keep reiterating when we talk about the WTO and talk about no deal WTO deal there's no such thing it's not a deal it's like if you go to DFS and you pay full price for so fat that's not really a
deal is it you're paying full price for it. In fact you're probably paying more than you should.
You can get a better deal elsewhere. That's why it's called a deal. If you get 10 percent off that's a deal just paying full
price for something isn't really a deal it's it's a trade I guess of sorts and don't get me wrong. Trade isn't going to stop because we leave the European Union. Of course it will continue. We still need stuff and people might
still want to buy all things. It's going to cost them a lot more to buy our stuff in future because we go into WTO rules. So if you're a farmer if you work in the agriculture industry if you work in the car industry if you work
making airplane parts your entire industry is going to be subjected to an extra layer of taxation for the customer in another country.
And so this is where we kind of really hits the nub of of what's going to WTO rules means.
It means putting trade sanctions on ourselves. So what normally happens with trade sanctions is a country like Iran or South Korea and North Korea or Russia is naughty. And so the other countries slap on these sanctions what a
sanction is if I want to buy oil from Iran I have to pay as a British person living in Britain I have to pay an extra 50 percent or 500 percent or 5000 percent tariff on that oil so I'll buy the oil elsewhere and that will cripple
the economy of Iran and hopefully get them to fall in line. That's how sanctions work. We're doing that to ourselves which is incredibly stupid and dangerous especially as Donald Trump has said that he doesn't really like the WTO
existing if the US pull out of the WTO then there's no max ceiling on those tariffs.
Any country could because we've got no deals with them already in place. You don't need the WTO to exist in order for those deals between
you know the the EU and Japan or the EU and and Canada or whoever. We don't need the WTO to exist for those deals to still remain. But if we've got no deals then there's nothing stopping those former members of the WTO if it doesn't
exist anymore from charging any tariffs they like and this is the point I made a little bit earlier about tariffs not going both ways. We might decide that we need more food which is possible in a no deal situation. We only grow
and produce enough food for about 50 percent of our needs at a push. We could maybe get 70 75 percent from if we change the farming practices and you know really positive got strong feed everyone. But still you're left with 50
million people who wouldn't have access to enough food and nutrition to have to import. We might decide to make it so corn from America we'll put the tariff down to zero because we need more corn and more corn starch more. You
know whatever you make record anymore wheat we need more oats whatever. If we do that for America we have to do that for everybody else. And it also takes away our ability to negotiate because we go to America Hey you wanna do
a trade deal and the like well okay what do you say what would you saw tariffs to zero on this particular product and say well it's already at zero.
What if we got Don't forget people that make trade deals because they want
to buy things off you they make trade deals because they want to sell you stuff. And this is something that I think a lot of people in Britain haven't quite got their head around. First of all Britain doesn't have that much money
comparatively. Sorry that much money. So it does have money it doesn't have that much in the way of natural resources. That's the one since 1989 we've been a net importer of oil and we don't have any goals.
We don't have
any diamonds. We don't have any coltan. We don't have any of these minerals that you need. We don't buy any iron ore. We can't make our own steel for instance. We do have iron ore. But it's really low grade. We do have coal but
it's really hard to get to because it's split seam coal mines with only about a handful of coal mines left in the UK. So when it comes to things like natural resources Britain is relatively poor. The reason why the WTO exists in
my guy existence in the first place is because the distribution of natural resources isn't even around the world some countries got more oil some countries have got more. I and some countries have got more something else bananas
which we can't grow here.
And the idea was that if you have a country that is trading the rest of the world you can say less than I can make this thing that you can't make.
So tell you what you make the tariffs zero
on this thing that I'm telling you. And the thing that we can't make like bananas will make the tariff zero on that. It's it's it's. It sounds very straightforward. But when you get down to all the different commodities you have
to do this with it gets very complex and here's the problem. When I said Britain does not much money before I misspoke I meant we did that much in the way of natural resources. The rest of the world does have a lot natural resources
so it could see viably get a lot these countries could get by on that road a lot better than the UK could. But the rest of the world is relatively poor.
And I'll give an example I often give which is the IMF regard only
35 countries the entire world to have advanced economies like the UK only 35 and twenty seven of them are in Europe only eight or not. And all those eight the European Union has comprehensive free trade agreements with four of
them which are Singapore South Korea Japan and and Canada.
Then there's Israel which we have an association agreement with. That leaves three countries which is New Zealand has a population of four and a half million or
something. So it's not exactly huge market for us because we're negotiating a free trade deal with them through the EU. Also Australia we're negotiating with them as well. And the big one is America bought America has a protectionist
president's in charge at the moment. American presidents have a lot of power when it comes to foreign policy. And so we can't see those protection but protection against ideology of America at the moment America first changing
anytime soon. And so you know so far we've got one. Nobody trades onto beauty or terms alone. Tariffs don't go both ways just because we set zero tariffs on imports doesn't mean that any other country has to set zero tariffs on
our exports. Trade has to work both ways. It's no good just going oh we've got cheap shoes now and we've got cheap food if you've got no money to buy those shoes or to buy those but that food it doesn't matter how cheap it is if
it's not free. You're not getting it. You start to pay for it something the WTO is not a deal it's an absence of deal it's a vacuum of deals it's a black hole of deals. There are no deals you have to start again from scratch the
rest of the world before rest the world is relatively poor five we can't make any better deals and this is a huge huge shock to the system for a lot of people that you've explained this to. Okay. The EU got their first OK so the
EU has trade negotiated trade deals with. With one hundred and sixty eight countries and territories around the world. Those deals might be comprehensive free trade deals like what we've got with Japan and got with Canada. It might
be even closer than that like the EPA deals that we've got with Switzerland Norway Liechtenstein and the like. It might be just an association agreement like what they've got with Israel. But if there's some kind of mechanism that
all those seven hundred and fifty nine different agreements if 759 different international treaties are gonna have to be re renegotiated by the UK on their own but not on their own because if we are talking to the islands of Tuvalu
in the in the Pacific Ocean so about fishing rights with them to replicate the fishing rights deal that we've got with them through the EU presumably the EU has to be involved in that negotiation because we might be taking some
of their rights away from them. So whatever trade deal we do that replicating the trade deals that we really got we've got to get the EU involved because they also include quotas and quotas are as a percentage of the entire not
signed such is usually a big figure. Is like half a million tonnes of New Zealand lamb is allowed to come into the UK as I entered into the EU at the moment and if the UK wants a better that tariff they've got to go and negotiate
with the EU like well how much does the EU want and how much does the UK want or otherwise would be in a situation where you using and says Well listen guys what we'll do is we'll just sell to the EU and we'll get the money off
them and then they can resell it to the UK. Now it's gonna Panos because you know once we've paid we've already got the tariff. We've also got the quota in place we can sell X amount so we'll sell at all or hundred percent of it
to the EU and then they can resell it because they don't particularly want to eat it themselves. Maybe I don't know but the fact is that the EU gets a say on it now with the bigger deals like the Canada deal Saturday along with
the Japan deal as part of the deal with the EU it's as you can give a better deal to anybody else can happen if they do give us a better deal than the EU got.
That country has to give the EU a better deal than it's already
given. So it's not very likely. I mean these people aren't. Yes.
Hold enhancing Kumbayah. Though international trade negotiators like sharks they're ready to meet in the flesh like we will be on our own swimming in the sea
looking very very vulnerable. So number six the points I want to make is the WTO is not democratic. One of the things that people say a lot about the EU is it's not democratic which is very strange as we've got over 70 MEP is now
directly elected by force and we've got a representative who's a commissioner and any laws major laws that go through that are important have to be checked by our parliaments and by our country and we have to say OK to it we have
a veto over anything important. So if they wants to make an EU army or they wanted Turkey to join or whatever we can say no unilaterally and it won't happen.
OK so we've got the situation now where we're going okay well
we don't want that. We don't want that power. We want to go to the WTO rules instead and then we'll have one representative in a hundred and forty six one that's it.
And I'll give you an example of why this might be a bit
of a nightmare a bit of a nightmare. There's something called the Government Procurement Agreement GPA. Look it up and at the moment it covers 46 countries and it's part of it's been negotiated in the WTO. It's got nothing to do
with the EU except that we are a member of it through the EU.
We joined as part of an EU group in the 90s and what the government procurement agreement does is it sets clear. It sets up this thing where are British companies
can bid for tender on American government contracts. So it might be to build an base or build a freeway or build a submarine base or whatever it is big infrastructure projects. The actual market itself is worth one point seven
trillion dollars trillion. That's like over one and a half thousand times bigger than our fishing fleets combined. So it's worth a lot that that market is particularly worth a lot of money to Britain and to our defense industry
which is very big in the UK. Basically this reentry to the GPI has to be ratified by all 45 of the members Moldova's said no Moldova you know Moldova. On the border with Ukraine and Romania. You know the one Moldova. No just me.
OK right.
There's a country called Moldova it's not part of the EU but it's part of Europe and it's part of the GPA which means that it has a complete veto on all the members joining the GPA and they are blocking us why
are they blocking us because we denied that one of the government ministers who was coming over to speak to the UK about future trade.
Last year we denied her a visa. We have given the power to decide whether we are part
of a one point seven trillion dollar market to Moldova we've also given the power to go to help in the negotiations or hinder negotiations.
To all of the the 759 existing treaties that the EU has that we're trying to replicate.
We've given power over that process not just to the countries we're gonna be negotiating with but also with the EU. And when I said earlier that we can stay a member of the WTO and that's fine because we are an original member
of GATT. Doesn't mean they have to take on board our schedule of tariffs and it only takes one member to say hey we're not happy about this. In fact they don't even have to say they're not happy about it. You say to say why they
just send an email to the director general or whatever the WTO and say we need more time to think about this.
And Argentina can do that. Spain can do that Egypt can do that.
Zimbabwe anyone who is a member of the
WTO can do that and hold up our tariffs from being ratified. So it's not very democratic in the way that we had democracy and we are going to be surrendering so much sovereignty.
Imagine surrendering the sovereignty of our
entire fishing fleet to Moldova then times that by a thousand. That is what is happening if we go to WTO rules okay. No deal means no deals. Number seven everybody is going to sue us. I hope you remember a few years ago there was
a TPP was it the deal between the EU and the US and this went back and forwards. And then one of the big sticking points was the fact that American companies would be able to sue British the British government if the British government
violated the agreements in some way. This is a bit of a worry because we don't want private companies like Facebook taking the British government to court. Fair enough. However there are thousands of foreign companies that have
invested in the UK over the last 40 years and they have invested over a trillion pounds in the UK because it's the gateway to Europe.
And suddenly we're changing the rules and their profits are gonna be hit by this like
I said earlier if you're selling a car that's been made in Sunderland to someone in France next year. If you go to WTO rules it's gonna cost 10 percent more. So the customer is going to buy a different car. So Nissan is gonna see
their profits going to see then what they can do although they can't. I don't think Sue the government directly they can go to the government of Japan and say hey we had this agreement with the UK and they said they'll let us have
a tax break for a few years. But we have to build a factory in this deprived area and provide jobs and blah blah income and regenerate the economy of Sunderland or Heywood or Ellesmere Port. Wherever the the government has signed
that. And that's part of the deal. This bilateral investment treaty it says we are not going to do anything consciously to damage the profits of your business. And we're doing that. We know we're doing it because everyone's saying
this is what's going to happen. Theresa May's deal. She keeps saying you know it's either this or no deal. And it's like well we're trying to mitigate the worst effects. It's not like any of this is gonna be good. Theresa May's
deal's no good but it's like we know it's gonna be bad. We just don't want it to be too bad. And this brings me to the final point of all this. So just coming down the tech list of WTO facts nobody trades on WTO rules alone. Tariffs
do not go both ways. WTO is not a deal. The rest of the world is relatively poor. I would just stop on that fact actually because I keep making this point. You put all the countries together in Africa 54 countries in Africa. You
put them all together and the got the GDP go and do it on Google right now. The GDP of all 54 countries Africa comes to about half the GDP of France or Germany.
Half the GDP of the forty eight poorest countries of the Commonwealth.
There's only 52 countries in the Commonwealth so just take four out. That's India the UK Canada and Australia. Take them out. All the ones you left with all of 48. Put them together adds up the GDP less than the United Kingdom
less than France's less than less than Germany's so here we go. Number five we can't make any better deals. We can't. The EU has got the best deals because they're fast. The WTO is not democratic in any way shape or form. And you
think the EU is not democratic. I have seen nothing yet. Number seven. Everyone is going to sue us. And number eight is the most important thing. Going to WTO times is illegal it's illegal. Not only do if if you want to try and
negotiate any better deals do we need to secure our borders. Which means putting a border in Ireland. Just the fact that we will have a different trade deal with anybody because we'll be on WTO rules means that we will by its very
nature have to put a border on the island of Ireland. And that violates the good Friday agreements the good Friday Agreement is the most important post war peace treaty that Britain has signed. If we violate that treaty of our
own volition in order to make trade deals with these other countries around the world that we're gonna make great trade deals with apparently we are in violation of the Good Friday Agreement. Most important I can say the most important
postwar peace treaty. I will add that we're going to be in violation of that and that means that not only are these countries that we have violated the agreements that we had all the agreements that we had about trade and investments
with their companies. Not only are we going to be messing that up we're also and you know looking at getting sued in the WTO at the World Bank in our own courts. If we violate the Good Friday Agreement we could be taken to the
Hague if that happens then as I said earlier we're putting trade sanctions on ourselves. We're putting sanctions on ourselves unilaterally saying to other countries I want to sell you this thing but I want to charge the customer
10 percent more than they were paying last year or 40 percent more on Welsh lamb it's 40 percent. Not only that we're saying we want to go to the Hague and possibly get international trade sanctions put on top of those trade sanctions
that were already putting on ourselves on which there were no limits. There's no WTO bare minimum maximum tariff whatever in that case they can slap any tariff they want on anything because we will be in violation of international
law so when people say that no deal no problem they really really don't know what they're talking about. Anything that we do now. Short of staying in the EU will be absolutely catastrophic for the British people for the next three
generations. And that's something that I as a Patriots will not stand for. I am not seeing my country become a laughing stock of the world. I'm not seeing my country go bankrupt. I'm not seeing my country going on its hands and
knees like it did in the 1970s to the IMF and asking for the biggest loan in human history just to keep us going just to keep us afloat. I don't want that future for me. I don't want it for the nation's children. And I will keep
fighting. So come at me.
Come on in the comments. That's our fight. Just say Oh no Graham you're not right. Because if we do go to our rules it will mean that we're free to trade with Zimbabwe or something. All right. And
I'll tell you exactly why you're wrong.
Good luck
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