Speeches by Bryant.

“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…”

“Amanda?”

“I have not seen either a or b, actually.”

“100%.”

“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…”

“Is Mr Cooper money?”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“Go on.”

“Earlier than that.”

“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—”

“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…”

“Completely, yes.”

“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…”

“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 think there are only about six countries that have produced a paper for the WTO so far. The US was early out of the doors and then the EU, and we have joined that group now. Part of our rationale is that we certainly want to see reform of the WTO so that it survives and meets the challenges of today. A classic instan…”

“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…”

“Every time that I go back to my constituency in the Rhondda I drive down a road that was built with cohesion funds, but Amanda will answer that.”