Keir Starmer faces further questions about his competency after a new report concluded his recent trip to China was a busted flush.
As the Prime Minister attempts to contain the fallout from Peter Mandelson’s past relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, new research has cast fresh doubts over his much-hailed trade deals with Beijing.
Sir Keir has found himself in the firing line over his decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US after fresh revelations about the latter’s relationship with Epstein emerged.
And as the PM’s political future appears to hang by a thread, hopes that his trip to Beijing could have provided a much-needed PR win may now have been dashed.
Upon returning to Britain, Sir Keir wrote in his Substack blog that over the course of the visit, he “welcomed £2.2billion in export deals, around £2.3 billion in market access wins over five years, and hundreds of millions worth of new investments”.
Sceptical about these trade wins, think tank Facts4EU and Stand for Our Sovereignty (SOS) crunched the numbers and found that they do not hold much weight.
As the report shows, China’s large trade surplus with Britain dwarfs any gains from these trade deals.
In a previous report, The People’s Channel showed how the cumulative surplus in goods trade, which Sir Keir has built with China since being elected, is over £75billion, excluding the effects of inflation.
The latest deep-dive further undermines these vaunted trade deals.
In his Substack piece, the Prime Minister claims “a win is a five-year forecast of the export value as part of the deal”.
However, as the report’s authors point out, no business can forecast export sales five years in advance. Yet this is how the PM is presenting the results of his China visit.
“Not on export sales at all, but on some wishful thinking they might materialise in the first place, and then a “guestimate” of what they might total over a five-year period,” the authors write, adding: “There isn’t any business in the country that would count these ‘deals’ in their official sets of accounts.”
