The second speaker at GBD’s Beyond Brexit event on January 28,
John Dickerman
is the Head of the Washington Office of the Confederation of British Industry or CBI. As Mr. Dickerman explained, the CBI, which represents some 190,000 companies, is the UK’s version of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable all wrapped into one. In addition to its 13 UK regional offices, the CBI has four international offices: one in New Delhi, one in Beijing, one in Brussels, and one in Washington, D.C. The focus of the Washington office is, of course, the relationship with the United States.
And as Mr. Dickerman explained, “The U.S.-UK relationship … is the largest bilateral economic relationship in the world.” So, although Mr. Dickerman ended his presentation last week with a note of caution about this year’s trade talks between the UK and the United States – a caution highlighted in today’s featured quote – he was quite clear that the CBI favors such a negotiation. More to the point he laid out “three areas where the CBI believes we can be ambitious and realistic in improving our [UK-U.S.] relationship.”
People was the first of these.
On this topic it is worth quoting Mr. Dickerman at length. He said:
We need to take a serious look at labor mobility between the U.S. and the UK. We think it would be practical to probably have something very similar to what we see in the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement or the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, whereby there is some mechanism for the UK to receive some sort of priority with respect to visas. I know in the Australia deal they have a whole new class of visas for Australian citizens. In the Singapore deal, they get a surplus — they get priority to H-1B visas, I believe, and I think they are only using about 5 percent of the ones that they actually receive on an annual basis.
Setting standards for the industries of the future
was the second area where Mr. Dickerman urged ambition in trade negotiations between the United Kingdom and the United States. Specifically, he talked about the UK and the U.S. setting new standards in the area of e-commerce and for products like autonomous vehicles.
Procurement
was the third area he highlighted. “We need to create a level playing field for UK investors in the United States on the issue of procurement.” Procurement is always a difficult issue for any country negotiating with the United States. That is because so much U.S. public procurement takes place at the state and local levels, and, while there are exceptions, in general the U.S. federal government is not able to bind the states in such negotiations.
The Cautionary Notes
. As much as CBI may want things from a U.S.-UK trade deal, it was clear from Mr. Dickerman’s presentation that they also have concerns. “We want to be sure that when we do get a deal, we get the right deal and not just a quick deal.” That comment came near the end of his presentation, but it was not his first reference to timing. “It is clear,” he had said earlier, “that there is political will in both the United Kingdom and the United States to negotiate a wide-ranging free-trade agreement and to begin as early as practical.” “I would stress,” he added, “that
political will is different than economic reality
.” And the strong ties that British businesses have to the European Union are a big part of that reality. So too is the history of Brexit from the perspective of the CBI.
Mr. Dickerman explained at the outset of his talks that the CBI membership is diverse and that CBI members were divided on the question of leaving the European Union or remaining within it, but not evenly. Eighty percent of CBI’s members had wanted to remain in the EU, Mr. Dickerman said, while 15 percent supported leave and 5 percent were undecided. Against that background, here is a more fulsome version of today’s featured quote:
[L]et’s be sure that in the course of negotiating this deal [between the UK and the United States] that we protect what we already have. And that could be construed as a really wide-ranging statement, and I actually … I mean it to be wide-ranging. Let’s protect what we’ve already got in the United States for sure. We also need to protect what we have with the EU. We have to be mindful of the fact that there are very strong economic ties – ties that bind the UK to the EU. And those are important to British business. … I’ll sum up my point by saying this. Let’s just remember, as we’re going through this process, that trade deals don’t happen in isolation. While the U.S. might want to negotiate with the UK, the UK does have some priorities outside of the U.S. And that’s going to be incredibly important for the UK to be mindful of. And for the U.S. to be mindful of in the coming year.
