Cameron turns focus outward with first post-election trade trip

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/24/david-cameron-south-east-asia-trade-delegation-trip

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David Cameron is to travel to south-east Asia next week with a high-profile group of businesspeople and ministers for his first trade and foreign policy mission since being re-elected.

After the victory in May, the prime minister vowed that “Britain is back” and said he would take a more active role in foreign policy after a year dedicated to the Conservative general election campaign.

Cameron will be keen to demonstrate his statesmanship during the visit while, in the UK, Labour’s leadership election campaign continues to unravel amid ideological infighting.

In a bid to show there are markets for UK industry outside the EU, Cameron described south-east Asia as a region on the rise, it now being the fourth largest market in the world. At present the UK does more trade with Belgium than it does with Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam combined.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Cameron said: “For too long, Britain has seen the weather vane pointing to these far-flung lands, but continued to rely on our European neighbours for trade and investment.”

The remarks can be taken as a strong hint that if Britain voted to leave the European Union, and its stagnating markets, it could survive economically by looking to the expanding markets of South America and Asia.

“I want us to be nothing less than the modern world’s most open, trade-minded nation,” he wrote. “To do that, we must tap into markets outside Europe; to look to the Commonwealth and beyond. There’s plenty of potential.

“Proportionally, more people in Singapore have smartphones than anywhere else. Indonesia has 55 million internet users. I remember Vietnam in the 1990s, when there were few cars on the road. Today, they buy around 150,000 cars every year.”

Cameron claimed the trade-linked foreign policy trips were proving beneficial, pointing out that, since 2010, the sale of UK goods had more than doubled to China and South Korea, two countries Cameron visited in his first term.

Cameron was expected to link the south-east Asia trip to business opportunities throughout the UK, not just in London, by giving a “northern powerhouse” brand to some of the meetings. He pointed out that “great northern [English] cities make the cars, design the planes and build the trains the world wants to buy. They have infrastructure plans and regeneration opportunities foreign investors are looking for. That’s why I’ll be hosting Britain’s first-ever ‘northern powerhouse’ delegation in Singapore – in fact, there will be a business from every region in Britain on the visit.”

He denied that trade missions were pointless or that foreign ownership of British firms was bad. “In my view, foreign ownership of British firms can be a positive thing – you only have to look at the Indian investment into Jaguar Land Rover and its impact on the West Midlands. While we will always guard against the theft of intellectual property, we don’t want to stand in the way of our entrepreneurs selling their ideas to the world.”