Speeches by Bryant.

“There are lots of bits of it. It is a series of chunks; bits of it are still progressing, and other bits are—I think the Americans themselves have used this term—“paused”. For instance, in our work on quantum research we are still moving forward.”

“Yes—thank you very much, Amanda. Part of my anxiety is that, in essence, I am a free trader: I believe in having free trade wherever you possibly can—preferably free and fair trade, which means that you have to consider responsible business conduct as well to make sure that you have a world trading system that works fo…”

“I do not think that it is going to get worse in the sense of the cataclysmic version that you laid out there, but I will go through the individual issues. Let me start with the Accelerator Act. This is a draft; it’s a first draft. You know the processes through the European Union. We had been engaging with the European…”

“I have said these things several times in the past. Of course, I fully recognise the red lines that we have, which is that we are not joining a single market or a customs union. Frankly, if we were to consider either of those things, I think it would be unlikely that we would be able to do them in the next 10 years bec…”

“If you were to do that in all sectors, that would be the job done in one sense. I am conscious that the time taken is always much longer than you think—as, for that matter, is accession to the European Union. In many cases, it takes decades; manging to get all the way through the acquis communautaire is a slow process.…”

“That is not me announcing a tariff; it is just saying that I can be absolutely certain that there will not be a gap.”

“Sorry, thank you—mutual recognition of professional qualifications. We are working on a series of sectors at the moment. There are a series of other standards—not just in relation to foodstuffs but in relation to furniture and electronic equipment and so on—where I would like us to get to a position of as much alignmen…”

“100%.”

“As much frictionless trade as is possible. What are the frictions in different sectors? You might have friction about business travel and whether people are able to do their business elsewhere in Europe. Some of that might be about mutual recognition of professional standards—”

“Earlier than that.”

“I irritate officials a lot. One of the difficulties with the EU on the SPS deal, for instance, is that, while we announced that we wanted to negotiate that last May, the Commission did not get its mandate from the EU until November, so we could not properly start negotiating until November. The United States of America…”

“Go on.”

“There is a technical reason why. Basically, what Canada was being offered in proportion to what it was seeking to achieve was very similar to the UK. If you want all the detail on that, we are happy to write to you, but Amanda is about to give some of it. As I say, British businesses are still able to participate, but …”

“I am doing my very best. One of the things I am conscious of in relation to negotiating with the EU is that I would obviously always prefer to move much faster. I would prefer to move much faster on everything, basically.”

“If I do SPS first, as I said earlier, the EU Commission got its mandate in November for negotiation on SPS, so we are undergoing that process at the moment. We have said that we want to complete that by the time of the next EU summit, which will be later this year. We still hope to be able to have all the legislation i…”

“India’s tariff, as you know, is going down from 150% to 75%, and then in later years down to 40%. We have also secured geographical identification in Argentina for Scotch whisky. We work on this all the time—it feels like it is one of our best clients.”

“Completely, yes.”

“They wanted something by 1 April, and I would be very upset if we had not announced something by then. I am not the person who gets to decide when announcements are made, but we are very close to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. I should say, because this may be an area that you want to ask me about, that one of t…”

“Sorry. I am very aware and we talk regularly to the Scotch Whisky Association—it says something here and I can’t read it. We are trying our best to get as good a deal as we possibly can.”

“I think they meant that they wanted an announcement by April, because between April and the end of June there will be the existing safeguard. They want an announcement about what will happen from July in relation to trade steel measures. As you know, under WTO rules whatever we do will be constructed in a different way…”