MANCHESTER: The Brexit vote gives Britain a golden opportunity to forge a new role for itself as the guardian of global free trade, Prime Minister Theresa May’s pro-Brexit trade minister said on Thursday.

The future trading terms of the world’s fifth largest economy were thrown into question by the June 23 Brexit vote, though May’s government has tried to reassure businesses that it will get the right trading deals for Britain.

In a speech to business leaders in the northern English city of Manchester, Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said Brexit was an opportunity to forge a new free trade consensus “as a newly independent WTO member outside the EU”.

“The UK has a golden opportunity to forge a new role for ourselves in the world, one which puts the British people first,” said Fox, who is likely to play a key role in Britain’s Brexit negotiations.

“This is potentially the beginning of what I might call the post-geography trading world,” he said. “We stand on the verge of an unprecedented ability to liberate global trade for the benefit of our whole planet.” But Fox also cautioned that his optimistic picture for a global free trade was being “darkened by the shadows of protectionism and retrenchment” that boded badly for the future.

The trade minister, who favours a so-called ‘hard Brexit’ or a clean break with the EU and its single market, also said it was in both Britain’s and the EU’s interests for their post-Brexit trading environment to be at least as free as it is now.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2016