All of us are looking for growth in our economies and the creation of jobs. From that point of view, it was very good news that President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union message, said that he was clearly in favour now of completing the work for a free trade commercial agreement between the European Union and the US.
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We are the world’s two largest trading blocks. 30 % of world trade passes between the US and the EU. We are each other’s largest trading partner, and largest investor. Calculations show that a real freeing up of tariff or non-tariff barriers could put 50 billion Euros into the European economy, with a huge creation of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
So this is a real opportunity, David Cameron is very keen to use our Presidency of the G8 this year to put all the weight of the Heads of State and Government of the G8 behind an effort to get this done as rapidly as we can, as part of spreading the wider network of free trade agreements.
In the Embassy, at our more modest level, we are also working hard to stimulate trade and opportunities between Britain and France. We recently held a large gathering of companies in the civil nuclear area (50 French and 50 British companies), all looking at the opportunities created by the enormous investment that we hope will shortly be agreed for EDF to take forward the new nuclear reactors in the UK.
This week, we are organising a cyber security conference, once again for British and French companies, looking at this area which is growing very rapidly of how we protect our cyber networks against the risk of attack, whether criminal or by other actors who want to get inside of our networks.