LONDON (FINACIAL Times) - Britain has held informal talks about joining a flagship Pacific trade group, in an audacious bid to kick-start exports after Brexit.
 The proposal, being developed by Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade, would make the UK the first member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that does not border the Pacific Ocean or the South China Sea.
 It would help to reinvigorate TPP, a key initiative of Barack Obama’s administration that appeared fatally wounded when Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. last January. The 11 remaining members, including Australia, Japan and Mexico, agreed in November to continue with a successor deal, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The UK discussions to join the distant trade group that has lost its biggest member come as Mr Fox embarks on a three-day trip to try and woo Chinese business. Greg Hands, a UK trade minister, said there was no geographical restriction on Britain joining TPP.
"Nothing is excluded in all of this,” he told the Financial Times. "With these kind of plurilateral relationships, there doesn’t have to be any geographical restriction.” However, UK accession would almost certainly have to wait until TPP itself has been revised, and the UK has agreed its post-Brexit relationship with the EU. The UK’s trade relationship with TPP countries pales in comparison to its existing one with fellow EU members or the US. Japan, by far the largest economy in the TPP, accounted for just 1.6 per cent of the UK’s goods exports in 2016, according to MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity, which compiles global trade data.