With the signing of the trade deal with Washington State today the UK has a collective free trade area GDP in the US worth more than £2trillion (that’s a thousand billion or 12 noughts after the two).
Yet Remainers still claim that Brexit is a failure and mock Brexiteers because the promised full free trade deal with the US has not yet materialised.
They are wrong about Brexit and even more so about US trade deals.
The fact is that the key deals for Brexit Britain were always the ones with the individual states and not the federal government.
That is not just the view of an ideological Brexiteer but the professional one of Marco Forgione, Director General of the Institute of Export and International Trade (IoE) which is working with Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch on maximising Global Britain’s opportunities.
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Forgione spoke to Express.co.uk in a wide-ranging interview on the huge opportunities Brexit has afforded Britain just as the embargoed press release on the £725billion Washington State deal landed.
By coincidence, he had just hosted a delegation from Jacksonville in Floriade with Ron DeSantis’s “Orange State” next on the list of 20 expected to sign a lucrative agreement with Britain.
While Mr Forgione wanted to avoid the politics of Brexit, he was very clear about its benefits and why the state deals in many ways trump the federal one.
The top reason for this is that the only way Britain’s massive service sector – including legal and financial services – can access the US market is through state agreements, not the federal government.
Mr Forgione was quick to point out that 80 percent of the British economy is made up of the service sector.
He noted: “The memorandums of understandings (MoUs) that the government is securing with the individual states are really powerful.
“What’s great about them is that they are each unique and distinctive based on the profile of the state itself.
“So it’s a much more meaningful partnership arrangement and it’s a clear statement of intent and commitment.”
He noted that while the Washington State one focuses on the aeroplane industry with Boeing among other things, the Florida deal “will be focusing much more on the FinTech side of things”.
He noted: “In Washington, Seattle and companies like Boeing, those sorts of links, which are about manufacturing, so absolutely about manufacturing, but also around services because it is the services which provide high value.
“It’s no secret that Rolls Royce makes its money not necessarily from the jet engine, but from the support package that is provided around the jet engines.
“So creating those state connections is really valuable, really important and gives access into the marketplace.
“Obviously, we would love to have a comprehensive federal trade deal. But you know, America doesn’t do that a lot.”
The state that is the home of Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks and Microsoft now joins Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Utah as a British trade partner.
Even bigger deals with California, Florida and Texas among others are set to follow.
British legal firms and financial services companies in our burgeoning service industry have unfettered access to US markets which they never had to the EU when we were members and no other country enjoys.
As Mr Forgione noted: “None of this would have happened without Brexit.”
How ironic that the EU-loving, anti-Brexit, possibly anti-Britain Joe Biden has put so much effort into preventing that UK/US trade deal but the real deals which the UK economy needs are happening all around him and there is nothing the US President can do.
It turns out that Brexit Britain is flying as high as Washington State’s famous Boeing aircraft.
