If you are watching the Brexit debate closely, you will have noticed the usual waffle that if we leave the EU then other countries won't be particularly interested in trading with us.

Who would say that in all seriousness? After all we are presently looking at a global slowdown in bulk freight, freight rates are tanking, there's a downturn in ship scrappage due to collapsing steel prices and a big oversupply problem - now leading to massively reduced orders in shipbuilding.



Little in the shipping sector looks rosy right now. Even Maersk Group reported a profit warning in October last year. Global trade flows have collapsed, nobody can quite agree why and nobody is quite sure what to do about it. Competition is fierce, margins are small.

As we reported just before Christmas, shipping companies the world over are looking to squeeze every last efficiency from supply chains even down to investing in infrastructure - and even going far inland to train officials in how to read and interpret paperwork. Anything to cut the delays from factory, field and mine to the ports.

The short of it is that nobody is going to turn their nose up at trade of any kind, not least a market of some of the wealthiest consumers in the world. Moreover, those innovations in reducing delays come from intellectual, administrative, engineering and accountancy expertise - in which the UK is a global leader. Britain is a major economy in or out of the EU.

More to the point, Britain free to negotiate its own trade can opt for industry specific agreements which are faster to establish, less likely to fail and easy to replicate. They require far less diplomatic resource. We can be more agile in our approach by going for partial scope agreements rather than the big bang deals that take years. Agreements of this type are hugely tempting to China at a time when every trade deal is critical.

Put simply, the notion that any nation is going to refuse business in a global slowdown just because we're not in a political union with the rest of the EU is so far fetched it is absurd. Only an individual who had failed to notice the global slowdown could suggest anyone can afford to be picky about potential markets right now - and for the foreseeable future.

But then of course there are plenty such people who have done exactly that. They have failed to notice very much at all outside their own insular and parochial bubble. These are the people who one day will be offering us their "expertise" on EU matters and the next are in a tweeting frenzy over who gets a job in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet - some five years from an election with a referendum in between. Their world is not ours.

It is our view that hit and run pundits and MPs are in no position to be telling us anything - let alone who they think should govern us.