The government is considering keeping membership of the customs union for certain products, Trade Minister Greg Hands suggested in an interview with Bloomberg this week. He said the government is “looking at broad possibilities” for how such unions can operate, as he explained what May meant when she said in November that membership was not “binary.”
“You can choose which markets, which products the customs unions affect and which they don’t -- so there isn’t a binary thing of being inside the customs union or outside of the customs union,” Hands said. “The history of international trade has got all kinds of examples of customs unions.”
Europe’s customs union allows members to enjoy tariff-free trade among each other and imposes the same duties on external countries. Hands’s comments signal the U.K. could be planning to seek agreements on duty-free trade with the EU for individual sectors, hoping that the likes of Germany will agree so as to protect access to the British market for their own exporters. [...]
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