 The EU is a trade deal, and it's very bad for us. There's an old-fashioned view among politicians that trade is something that politicians organise. It's not. Trade was all about the great and the good from one country signing a treaty with the great and the good of another country. But real life is starting to leave that behind. I've headed back to South Shields to visit John Mills, one of the Labour Party's biggest donors. His company, JML, has hundreds of products manufactured for them in countries all around the world and exports thousands of container loads of goods every year to every corner of the planet. This business is truly global. Well, we export to about 85 countries at the last count. The majority of these countries are not in the European Union, but it's actually no more difficult for us to sell to the United States or to Australia or to even China than it is to sell to the EU. The idea that you have to be in the European Union to trade with the European Union is a total absurdity. Wander into any shop in Britain, and you'll find goods from all over the world. Cameras and TVs from Japan, computers and phones from America. But we have no trade deals with these countries. You don't need a trade deal with a country to be able to trade with it. What do you do shopping? Well, you buy Chinese goods. You buy Korean goods, you buy American goods, and yet none of those countries are part of the European Union. China doesn't have a trade deal with the European Union, nor does the United States, nor does India. You don't need trade deals. Trade involves having a product or a service, which other people are prepared to buy at whatever price you can produce it for. Though we don't need a trade deal to trade with Europe, it's highly likely they will want one for one simple reason. The EU is desperate to keep its goods flowing into the UK. You go outside, you count, don't take my word for it, go count the number of Audi's, BMW's, Mercedes, Volkswagen's. You'll find it's over 30% of our market. The German's biggest industry needs us to the tune of 16 billion plus every year. We are actually the biggest market for the rest of the European Union. We are not a supplicant. We need a bit of self-belief and a bit of self-confidence. Even though we're EU members, since the turn of the century, the proportion of British trade with the EU has been in steep decline, while trade with the rest of the world has been rising sharply. There's no trade deal at the moment with China. The EU does not have one. But if you look at Anglo-Chinese trade over the last 10 years, say, that has been growing several times faster than Anglo-EU trade. Well, of course, there is a trade deal. Our percentage of trade with the EU is falling virtually by the minute. I mean, it's tumbling even as we conduct this interview. Every single year that goes by, the percentage of British overseas business that is done outside the EU grows at double the rate of the business we do inside the EU. They need us more than we need them. Ah, but what if the EU proposes a trade deal which forces on us open borders and other stuff we don't like? If a proposed trade deal is unacceptable to us, whether it's with the EU or anybody else, we just don't sign it. It's true that British companies who export to the EU will have to comply with EU regulations. But it's also true that EU companies wanting to export to Britain will have to comply with ours. Germans who export to America must abide by American regulations, likewise for American exporters to China. And Chinese exporters to Brazil and Brazil to the EU. Every exporting company in the world has to comply with the laws of the place they're exporting to. Trade deals make no difference. One of the arguments put by the in-crowd, the remainers, is, oh well, you know, it takes a long time for Europe to come up with a free trade agreement. It's taken nine years to come up with a free trade agreement with Canada. Well, it's a very good reason to leave. In the globe lies 21st century, you don't need a trade deal to trade. And yet, they're still useful. The question is, are we more likely to have bigger and better trade deals inside the EU or outside? Let's add up the GDP of all the countries that have trade deals with the EU. It comes to five trillion pounds. Golly, that sounds a lot. But look at Switzerland, 29 trillion. And what about tiny Singapore? They've got trade deals worth seven times as much as the EU's and South Korea, nine times. Chile, population eight million. It's got 50 trillion, unbelievable. But let's cheat. Let's add to the EU pile the value of its own internal market, as if it had a trade deal with itself. It's still rubbish. You can't throw a shipping container without hitting a country with better trade deals than the EU. In fact, if you're trying to avoid trade deals, joining the EU is probably the best thing you can do. The EU has got no trade agreement with China or India or Russia or the United States. I mean, it's staggering that they haven't managed to achieve that. Of Britain's top ten non-EU trading partners, the EU has trade agreements in place with only two. As far as trade deals go, being part of the EU cuts you off from the rest of the world. Our history is a trading, buccaneering history, you know, back to Drake and beyond. And that's what we're good at. At the moment, our hands are shackled by being in the European Union. We've got a much, much better opportunity really for striking good trade deals if we're outside the EU than if we're inside. If we left the European Union, we could very quickly establish free trade deals with the most dynamic parts of the world economy. Today, Europe doesn't apply the future. The future consists of nations in Asia and America and Africa. Getting stuck in fortress Europe is the worst thing that could happen to us. The idea that we have to stay in the EU for prosperity is wrong-headed. Why do we need to attach ourselves to the one part of the world that's doing really badly? Within Europe, we know what our future is going to be to some extent. It's going to be pretty stagnant while the rest of the world roars ahead. We have huge scope, huge scope for creating vast numbers of new jobs. Being obsessed with just this corner of the world is being a little European. Outside Europe, we could have prosperity on a level that we can't even imagine now. Escaping fortress Europe could be a new start for Britain, a return at last to the global commercial and trading giant we were in the 19th century. If we embrace free trade and escape the stultifying restrictions of EU over-regulation, there's the potential for an extraordinary economic renaissance. Britain is a great country. I think our economy is poised for much greater things. But I think in the last two or three decades, something really interesting has happened in this country. We've changed. We've embraced entrepreneurialism. Young people now want to go to loan. They want to run their own businesses. They want to be self-employed. They don't want to work for these big multinationals anymore. They want to build their own multinationals.