More evidence is emerging that President Obama’s threat to send Britain “to the back of the queue” over trade should we leave the EU is an empty one not worthy of serious consideration.

The UK is the largest cumulative investor in the US with over $520 billion of assets in the country and is the second largest annual investor in the US at $42 billion each year. In total (2010 figures) the UK employs around one million US citizens and at least 26 major US firms from Apple, Boeing and Chrysler to Xerox and Yahoo will be putting pressure on President Obama and his successor not to cut ties with the UK. For the same reasons Renault, Mercedes, MAN and many other major firms in the EU will not be wanting their nations to enter into a trade war with the UK on ‘Brexit’ either.

The truth is that both the USA and EU need British markets at least as much as we need theirs.

There will be no ‘trade war’.

Additional benefits to both the USA and UK from us leaving the EU include removal of the EU’s import tariffs on goods produced outside thus lowering prices and boosting trade, particularly on things like food where our being in the CAP adds enormously to the costs of food imports from outside the EU.Another huge potential boost to the UK economy from the leaving the EU will be the opportunity to remove many petty, but expensive, regulations which make it very costly for shipping companies to enter EU waters. By removing many of these, leaving only those genuinely needed for safety for example, we could massively reduce the costs to shipping firms of sending vessels to Europe thus making the UK the ‘port of choice’ for international trade with onward journeys into and out of the EU being made via Southampton or London, Bristol or Liverpool rather than Rotterdam as at present.

Shipping companies would, collectively, save billions of pounds per year, while the UK economy gets a major boost from our being outside the EU. There are simply no ‘downsides’ to our leaving the EU so far as trade is concerned. Well, maybe just one from Mr Obama’s perspective; if we are outside the EU the US President would find it many times harder to force the highly damaging (to UK interests) TTIP proposals onto our country. And that, by itself, is just another excellent reason to vote ‘leave’.

Glen Wilson Pedmore