00:00Jono, there we are. It's Keir Starmer in China. Reports. All signal, productive talks happening.
00:08Is this better than we actually expected?
00:10I mean, anything. I always, and I'm the first person to jump down his throat when he says something in the House of Commons,
00:18and I just think, what? What is going on? Who put him there?
00:20When something like this, when it's on an international stage, you've got to try and say that this guy is doing something right.
00:26He's a guy who caused it up to Trump, got very, very close, and had influence up until it all went tonsils up,
00:33and there was a tariff war back on again because he said something he shouldn't have. Fine.
00:36But he's done a very good job. We've seen him do it with France.
00:39We've seen him get into bed, in the European sense at least, with the right movers and shakers,
00:44and now we see it do it in China again, and I think he's done it quite well with Xi Jinping here.
00:48Right now, arguably better than expected. Expectations were deliberately low,
00:52but then again, I think when you send in Starmer somewhere, you end up with low expectations.
00:56But the tone has shifted now. From a Chinese point of view, which I think is nothing but good news for the UK,
01:01from tension to pragmatism, which is where it needed to be, both sides have signaled this engagement,
01:08and now we're seeing some level of communication. It's not a reset. This is a stabilisation,
01:14and I think it's one that the UK definitely needed in terms of when it looks at trade partners on an international level.
01:19You have to say, right, you're going to pick one of the big ones, and I think China's probably a really smart one to go with.
01:24And these are not big, big deals. Visa-free travel has been something like Ireland has had it.
01:28I think there's a couple of European countries that have this, right?
01:30Fifty other countries have it, so the UK are quite late to the game. France has it already, if you look at the European countries.
01:37So it is something that they have been awarded a long time in the making.
01:41But it's still, in terms of a golden handshake kind of a deal, this is a nice one.
01:47The whisky deal, again, very irrelevant, but there is something there.
01:52It's very symbolic more than anything else.
01:53We're not seeing big numbers. We're not seeing big trade deals or anything like this,
01:57but it's a move in the right direction.
01:59And he seems to have set himself up on the international stage yet again
02:02with somewhat of a success story walking away from China, which is impressive.
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