Indonesia, with its rapidly growing economy, applied to join in September following bids from Ukraine, Ecuador and Uruguay. Thailand and South Korea are also lining up.
Membership will become more valuable as new nations join, internal government analysis first reported by POLITICO shows. Britain’s agriculture and food sectors will bear the brunt of the downside. Manufacturers and Britain’s powerful services sector, including banks, insurance, and consulting firms stand to benefit most.
The bloc “will grow” opening up new opportunities, insisted Crawford Falconer, the outgoing Whitehall official who devised joining as he architected the U.K.’s post-Brexit trade agenda, during a lecture at the London School of Economics in March 2023. When it comes to the faltering WTO — after Trump crippled its trade dispute court in 2017 — “you’ve got to have a Plan B. And what is Plan B? Well, I mentioned CPTPP,” he said.
New friends, old friends
While the deal’s champions like Falconer and Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Truss and Rishi Sunak fade from power, there’s a “political consensus” around joining that gives firms “security,” the DBT official said.
Arguments between Britain’s Brexiteers and EU rejoiners that the deal will block the U.K. from getting closer to the EU are a “non-issue,” Alty said.
“Nobody sensible sees this as some sort of alternative to membership of the EU or a sort of replacement for that,” the former official, who now works as a consultant at Pagefield, said. Membership is “a sensible way to strengthen your trading environment and relationships with some important parts of the world,” Alty insisted.