UK signs trade agreement with Turkey

The UK has signed a free trade deal with Turkey.

The continuity agreement, signed by both trade ministers on Tuesday in a video conference call, takes effect on 1 January and ensures that the existing flow of goods will not be affected when the UK formally leaves the EU at the end of the year.

Trade between London and Ankara was worth £18.6bn in 2019, and the UK is Turkey’s second-biggest export market, mostly for precious metals, vehicles, textiles and electrical equipment. While Turkey is not an EU member, it does have a customs union with the EU, meaning that the new UK-Turkey deal could not be struck until after the Brexit deal was finalised.

“Today’s deal delivers vital certainty for business and supports thousands of jobs across the UK in the manufacturing, automotive and steel industries,” said the international trade secretary, Liz Truss.

“It paves the way for a new, more ambitious deal with Turkey in the near future, and is part of our plan to put the UK at the centre of a network of modern agreements with dynamic economies.”

Turkey’s trade minister, Ruhsar Pekcan, called the deal a landmark in UK-Turkish relations.

According to the Department for International Trade, the new deal will secure existing preferential tariffs for 7,600 UK businesses exporting machinery, iron and steel to Turkey, and protect automotive and manufacturing supply chains.

The accord also commits both countries to discussions aimed at expanding the scope of the agreement to include services and agriculture within the next two years.

Turkey started talks aimed at joining the EU as far back as 2005, and at that time Britain was one of the countries supporting EU membership for Turkey - with people who were to end up on both sides of the Brexit argument, including David Cameron on the one side and Boris Johnson on the other, at that time supporting that position.

However, changes in the position of the present Turkish government made this increasingly more difficult.

The UK-Turkey agreement will come into force from next month. There will not be time for it to be fully ratified in either of the two countries’ parliaments before the year’s end, but both governments will use executive powers to apply it on an interim basis from 1st January until it can be put to their respective parliaments..

The deal with Turkey is the fifth-biggest of the bilateral free trade agreement the UK has negotiated with individual states after the deals with Japan, Canada, Switzerland and Norway. Trade agreements with 62 countries have now been signed in preparation for the UK’s formal exit from the EU single market on 1 January.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more