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:
"The British business community and myself personally are very, very committed to getting an ambitious and a swift and a meaningful T-TIP."
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:
"I regularly say to my colleagues in the NGO community and the consumer lobby and the trade union community, I'm not looking to lower any standards anywhere." And separately,
"I want that stuff [standards issues] dealt with as far as possible through mutual recognition."
Financial Services. "I don't think we'll have an agreement that lives up to the level of ambition I am looking for if financial services is not part of that agreement."
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."