What the UK buys and sells in a day.

It was kind of sad to see Ed Balls, the former Labour shadow chancellor, on his series on BBC2 to be apparently so out of his depth, discovering things that you would have thought, and hoped, the person who had his eyes of one day taking the great office of Chancellor of the  Exchequer would have had fully under his grasp and understanding.   

No so. Like a child in the metaphorical sweetshop he was wide eyed at the issues faced in the port of Southampton.  Take the number of cars that went out and in each day.  He dicovered there were more cars coming in than going out, though the cars going out were much higher value and going around the world while the ones coming in were almost exclusively from the EU.   

Just ponder that fact for a moment.    

And yet that boyish charm of his seemed to wave away the underlying thought that this was actually probably the first time he had been in a place like Southampton, away and free from political slogans.   

Going back to Episode One where he first discovered that the majority of stuff going in and out of the UK wasn’t coming or going to the EU but to the big wide world which we are actually pretty good at trading with, in spite of all the limitations that being in the EU  brings to exporters.   

Unfortunately he spoiled the whole programme with his last sentence, a somewhat disingenuous and naïve comment about Brexit.  The programme didn’t need politics in it.  Particularly when his comment went against everything he had just discovered in the programme.

The UK is a world trader.