EU trade deals are always rigged against us, warns Lord Redwood

LORD John Redwood has said the government’s plans to align with the EU will be “a disaster” as trade deals are “rigged” against the UK.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “I was asked to negotiate some of the single market measures, much against my will, because at the time when I did it, I was appalled by how little democracy there was and how damaging some of those measures were.

“I spent my time diluting and delaying because it was going to be bad news.

“The facts are very clear. If you look at the data, the last 20 years we had in the full single market, we grew at under half the rate that we were growing up before we entered Europe in the first place.

“It was a disaster for us, and in the intermediate period when we first joined we were just in the Customs Union, the full single market horrors hadn’t unfolded, it still made a big dent in our growth rate, and it closed a lot of our industries because we weren’t competitive enough, and we just took all the tariffs off that favoured them.

“They didn’t give us anything back, so we weren’t able to increase our market share in the services that we were very good at. So it was always asymmetric, rigged against us, and we ended up worse off.

“We have a massive deficit in agriculture, and if we trade more we will have an even bigger deficit which means less GDP not more GDP.

“Why do we sell so little meat and so little milk at the moment? It is because of their controls and the damage they did to our industries.

“It’s got to be two-sided, free trade. And it’s always one sided with the EU and they want to put on huge tariffs cheaper products we can’t make for ourselves from the rest of the world. That’s going to be a disaster as well.”