Man, Quiche is being so chipper and optimistic about all of this. For y'all's sake I hope he's right. I must confess I'm rather less optimistic about this thing.
News (Tagesschau) claimed there's already 7.2% fewer exports from Germany to the UK compared to last year. May the gods have mercy upon all of us.
I don't really get this. All of the other countries outside of the EU seem to manage. In fact, there are advantages to not negotiating as a large bloc along with disadvantages obviously.
The biggest problem is that UK hasn't needed to negotiate on that scale and in that particular area for a long time now and thus has to scramble to get back the expertise and staff. Keep in mind these things can take up to a decade to nail down.
Afterwards, they will have to start from scratch instead of organically growing into those deals like the other small countries. After EU has possibly finished ripping out their desired chunks of flesh, they might not even find themselves in a particularly good economic situation, which makes negotiations harder. Especially given the time frame for any wide-ranging trading agreements. UK would need those deals, like, yesterday.
What are the specific advantages to being a small country instead of a large trading bloc in this context? Flexibility? Because that's pretty much the only thing I can imagine. The only thing is that such a large body is less flexible and less agile if things get really involved since it's still a bunch of loosely tied together countries.
A bigger market being more desirable from the viewpoint of the partner, more and better skilled/paid/rested negotiators doing better work (and given the potential profit for less money per country), less reliance on the resulting payout meaning less exploitable urgency... a trading bloc is superior in any other regard that I could think of. Granted, I'm just a lowly IT drone and have no clue about economics.