Yes, really. I read some great news on the day the negotiations started. You could be forgiven for thinking there isn't any (and I'm guilty for adding to the gloom) but the Times reports* that, contrary to the doom mongers who have consistently said we don't have, and can't get, the people with the knowledge to do the necessary deals, that we've got ourselves a star on trade deals. And just in time for the start of the season, to make a football transfer analogy.
His name is Crawford Falconer and he was New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO. He has been appointed Britain's chief trade negotiation adviser and second permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade. He has more than 25 years of trade policy experience with New Zealand, one of the most outward looking countries, and with the OECD. He has worked on some of the thorniest international trade issues, including the dispute between the EU and the USA on subsidies to Airbus and Boeing.
Not only that, he thinks it's a do-able task. He is hugely positive about Britain's potential, the experience we have despite 'taking a cup of tea' while Brussels has done all the recent negotiations and, though he says there are plenty of highly paid people who are inherently difficult and will come up with 10,000 reasons why there's a technical difficulty, he damned them as bureaucrats with a personal financial interest in stringing things out like a Japanese kabuki play. He says the next 2 years is partly political, partly technical but he doesn't see it as problematic. "That'll be a lot of hard work for a lot of bureaucrats but actually, in the political sense, it's not fundamentally complicated".
Sounds like my kind of guy and the best signing of the transfer window. What with him and Pickford and Klassen joining Everton, that's cheered me up a lot!
* Britain has put its post Brexit trading future in good hands, Ian King 19 June
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