John Cridland is the Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI, whose 200,000 members account for roughly 40 percent of the UK's GDP.  Mr. Cridland and the CBI are indeed the voice of British business.  And that voice had a clear message when John Cridland kicked off last week's Global Business Dialogue session on T-TIP.  He said:

That call for success in the negotiations toward a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was the core of John Cridland's message.  And yet we have chosen to highlight something else, namely today's quote which encapsulates a British view of the European Union.  We shall return to that later because we think it is important.  First, here are some other things John Cridland said about T-TIP:

The UK's Relative Stake. "Britain has so much more to gain and the British economy has so much more to gain [from T-TIP] than even some of our European cousins."

Trade Agreements.  "International trade agreements are vital to the British business community."

China. One such agreement Mr. Cridland has his eye on is an EU trade agreement with China.   While that may be a long way off, people are working on it.  Mr. Cridland was part of the delegation Prime Minister David Cameron took to China last December - "the largest overseas trade and ministerial mission" to date, according to The Guardian.   Mr. Cridland sees T-TIP, in part, as a stepping stone to a more difficult EU-China deal.  "We need the bedrock of T-TIP for everything else we want to do," he said.

Tariffs.  "Why is the European chemical industry, of which Britain is particularly strong as a leader, spending €500 million a year importing chemicals into the United States?"  Mr. Cridland would like to see all tariffs disappear between the U.S. and the EU, and he expressed some disappointment about the initial American tariff offer.

On Regulatory Coherence.  "We know ... that 80 percent of the benefit of T-TIP will come from our action on regulatory architecture," he said.  In his quite rich discussion of the regulatory issues, Mr. Cridland argued for jumping the hurdles of regulatory differences wearing the Nikes of mutual recognition.  In his words:

Mr. Cridland acknowledged that a detailed chapter on financial services might not be realistic, but, he said, financial services "needs to be there in the high-level principles."  After making the obvious point that the T-TIP area includes two of the world's major financial hubs - London and New York - Mr. Cridland said, "It can't be good for global financial services to have regulatory arbitrage between the two principal financial service capitals of the world."

The starting point for John Cridland's T-TIP talk last Tuesday was the relationship among these three entities -- four if you count the U.S. separately.  The United States is Britain's largest trading partner, and a U.S.-UK free trade agreement would make a lot of sense.  And that is in the T-TIP box, but the label is U.S.-EU.
 
John Cridland was candid and straightforward not only about his view of T-TIP - he's for it - but also about where he stands regarding Britain's membership in the European Union.  He is for that too, but he does not take it for granted.  "The European Union is not popular in the United Kingdom," and "the future of Britain's membership is really up in the air," he said.

And the politics of that issue are likely to get increasingly complicated, especially after the elections for the European Parliament in May. 

T-TIP is hardly going to make all of those complications go away.  After all, these debates are about the fundamentals of government.  They come down to the critical question in Lenin's pithy phrase, "Who, whom?"   Who shall make the rules?  Who will have to follow them?  For what reasons?   And by what authority?
 
T-TIP isn't going to answer all of those questions, not for British citizens nor for anyone else.  What it might do, however, what it has the potential to do, is to add some real benefits into the cost-benefit analysis of Britain's EU membership.   That, in any case, is one of our strongest impressions from John Cridland's remarks on March 11.  He left us with the sense that the UK is serious about T-TIP, knows what it wants, and why it wants it. 

Is that a good thing?  Possibly.  Certainly, the United States benefits from having a serious, committed, and engaged partner - Brussels as well as London - in the T-TIP negotiations.

But there are downsides too.  The notion that 80 percent of the benefits of T-TIP are to be found in the regulatory area is a troubling one, given how unclear everyone seems to be about just where the regulatory negotiations will lead and how they will get there.

Finally, there is the ironic danger that the clarity of Mr. Cridland's remarks could easily lead to a misunderstanding of the larger picture.  Because he tied T-TIP to a major domestic issue, Britain's EU membership, one might be tempted to conclude that the UK (and perhaps the EU) need a T-TIP deal more than America does.  Our own understanding of what Mr. Cridland said was a little different.   What we saw was a business leader intent on finding new opportunities, preferably with old friends like the United States, but also with new partners like China.