Yeah except neither party to this deal is producing "cheap stuff". Both consider themselves to be very much "top tier".
> edit - to clarify, the point i'm trying to make is that it really doesn't cost much to ship stuff halfway around the world, especially en masse
Yeah, if the stuff is "cheap". Like dramatically cheaper than what you can produce at home.
Unfortunately for Brexiteers who use this as an argument for No-Deal Brexit being an opportunity, however, geography was a big consideration for how pretty much every company in the world has set up its supply chains and partners.
"The geography is a bit of an issue for physical goods" when you're not producing goods cheap enough to cover the cost of transit. The UK does not produce cheap goods. Quite the opposite.
I don't think racing to the bottom in living standards to compete productively with China is something that people voting for Brexit had in mind.
The main issue people are concerned about is that the UK would be flooded with cheaper/sub standard goods (re. chlorinated chicken) that they can't differentiate between standard UK/EU products which are of a higher quality. Currently, US meat is outright banned in the EU, if there's an influx in cheap/chemically altered meats coming from the US which people can't differentiate from (this is partially due to the terms of the trading deal banning branding of goods as "Produced in the UK") then people are worried they'd accidentally end up buying them.
Not such a concern about where you’re going to get the £££ if all you’re buying is cheap junk in $$$ but even so there’s got to be cheaper places to buy cheap junk from and sure with the rules lifted why not just start producing cheap junk yourself!
Such things would be clearly labelled and no worse than the US standard. If consumers want it, they will buy it. If they don't, they won't.
Distance really isn't much of an issue at scale, when your cheap stuff comes from China - - edit - to clarify, the point i'm trying to make is that it really doesn't cost much to ship stuff halfway around the world, especially en masse. -, or meat from New Zealand, this isn't much of an argument. This would be a purely US beneficial deal, the UK wouldn't really be bringing anything into the US, other than maybe finance services, specialist products or (i guess) softer products like educational visas?
There's quite a big controversy over here at the moment about the possibility of a US trade deal. We are being told that for it to happen we would have to accept terms like chlorinated chicken/steroid injected beef, and then agree to other things like labeling the origin of the product (so you would never really know if you were eating US or UK products). There's a whole other host of subtleties which would degrade the UK whilst being beneficial to the US, just do a bit of googling about the proposed deals.