Why do you believe that the EU would be in a better position? It's like a rat king when it comes to negotiating, 27 countries pulling in different directions all with different desires.
That scenario is exactly what happened in the Doha Development Round.
The EU has a history of being really slow at negotiating trade deals unfortunately.
Further, the EU enforces VAT fees and implements protectionism with these methods to favour EU-based businesses, even when no EU competitors exist. These fees have a trendency to reduce economic activity within the EU and prevent cheaper alterantives from outside of the EU being effective as they end up becoming a similar prices or more expensive when the customs fees are applied (despite trying to pass on the savings from signficantly lower production/service costs with less gross income than an EU company which results in a similarly priced product that the customer sees).
Even with a worse trade deal than the EU, the UK can stand to benefit because it won't be required to tack expensive fees on top for the purposes of protectionism of industries that may not even be in the UK to begin with.
Had to look it up, looks like 85:ish % of the UK trade is with the EU.
When I said "reduced economic activity in the EU", I mean as a whole. This is an over simplfiication, but imagine a situation where everything is 20% more expensive than the normal asking price, this leads to less purchases being made as a whole. It doesn't matter if you're purchasing from outside the EU too, because it's still 20% more expensive. The overall economic activity in such an area is simply reduced.
The trade numbers simply are the way they are because importing doesn't really reduce the costs either. It should also be noted that exporting products outside of the EU has additional fees that make us less competitive than the alternatives outside of the EU too, so our exports are impacted too.
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...
The UK had the benefit of memebership of the EU (the freedoms of goods/services/people) without the hindrance of the Euro on its own monetary policy.
Now people that can't even remember what it was like to be at the end of the British empire think that there was some magical period to go back to. It's pathetic.
The UK is losing that export market. Really really dumb.
One would think, but the EU has been trying and failing to secure any kind of a trade deal with the US, largely due to Europe's instinctive love of protectionism.
Remember, our cheese doesn't come out of a tube, usually.
I don't think it's a lack of plastic cheese alternatives that has people buying French cheese.
One would think that the EU would be in a better position to get better deals than a single country.