A Convenient Obama Visit

Clearly President Obama is here to help Cameron in his pro EU campaign. Why else would he come, after all, he appears to dislike this country and all it stands for?

The main outcome of his visit, apart from some photographs with the Queen and Prince George for his album, is that he has shown himself to be a hypocrite and has allowed his dislike of this country to to overcome whatever common sense that he might once have had. His main argument for us staying in the EU seems to be that we will be put at the 'back of the queue' when it comes to discussing trade agreements as the US would rather negotiate with one group of 28 nations than with a single country.

I would suspect that anyone else involved in negotiating with the EU would argue the exact opposite, it is far easier to reach agreement with a single country than with a group where they all individually have to concur with the decisions reached by their negotiators. But that aside, Obama won't be president in eight months time, so he can't possibly predict what a future administration might do.

As reported in Breitbart, his view is also contradicted by an official from their Office of International Trade who, in an e-mail said

“This is the first time I’ve heard of the assertion that the UK is too small to have an FTA with the US… clearly the UK is not too small to have an FTA with the US if we have one with Oman.”

But neither is the trade deal with the EU likely in the near future, as Obama told the press that a U.S./EU trade deal is “not going to happen anytime soon”.

In any case, does it matter? We are trading with the US at the moment, apparently without any agreement, and it is difficult to visualise why there should be any change if we left the EU.

Finally, for a laugh, the reply that Obama gave when asked by a student in London what he wanted his legacy to be.

"Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good"

 I thought that was Gordon Brown's line!