After Brexit: the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties with other countries

[Denzil_DC]

2. "... the politicians stay out of it, and ... the competent Whitehall officials ... do their ... job.

I suspect there's fat chance of the first happening - I'm not clear how much of the Henry VIII changes proposed would involve areas of international trade, but the main rationale for granting the sweeping, unaccountable powers under whatever survives of the EU Withdrawal Bill has been that decisions will have to be made and enacted very quickly in the immediate run-up to and aftermath of final Brexit. If some of those mean compromising inherited (and currently embodied in UK law) EU standards, I'd guess that would happen.

As for the second, unless there's been some massive hiring campaign I haven't heard of, the last news was that our civil service had next to no expertise in international trade agreements because we'd so long relied on EU negotiators to take care of all that for us. Hiring in such qualified and experienced help as the government's been able to find so far sounds like it's been very expensive.

The problems with "yes, same terms as we agreed with the EU as a whole, no problem" are at least threefold:

(1) EU regulations get continually revised (triggering like clockwork our RW media) - do the agreements get amended to keep in step?

(2) If we depart from adherence with any EU regulations to accommodate other trade partners (I imagine it would be to downgrade, not enhance them), we may find ourselves locked out of EU markets - we could also get caught in the situation of countries like the current US administration trying to use us a Trojan horse into the EU market, which isn't going to help our diplomatic efforts or post-Brexit relationships with the EU.

(3) We will have no say (in Brexitbotspeak: even less than we do now) in the shaping of these EU regulations.