Liam Fox speech/theme at CBI dinner tonight "A Britain Ready For Opportunity"

So it's nice to get away from it all, to a relaxing night of being grilled by the U.K.'s top business executives. It's the closest thing I get to a holiday.

But, to be serious ??? I recognise that for many of the businesses represented in this room, the period since the European referendum has been one of some uncertainty, as we negotiate the terms of our new relationship with our European partners.

But let me reiterate that the government is committed to ensuring that the UK and the EU are able to maximise access to one another's markets in the future, while enabling the UK to take advantage of new markets and relationships that emerge.

We want to avoid the disruption that no deal would bring to both the UK and the EU.

Although it has been reducing as a proportion of the total, let's remember that the EU accounts for 45.6% of our exports and 53.6% of all our imports come from the EU. We will remain hugely important markets to one another. 

We should want to see a prosperous and growing EU, for that represents increased opportunity and profitability for British businesses. That is why good deal on our Future Economic Partnership is in our mutual interest. 

But the prosperity of the UK and its businesses will only fully benefit by being able to take advantage of all potential global markets. And remember that the EU itself accepts that 90% of global growth in the next 5 years will be outside continental Europe.

To do this we need to increase UK exports, encourage more open market access and liberalisation, and defend the concept and practice of free trade within a rules-based international system.

Let me begin with exports. Whether or not we had decided to leave the EU, the UK needed to improve our export performance.

In 2016 UK exports were equivalent to only 28.3% of GDP ??? much too low a figure for an economy so dependent on trade. Thanks to the efforts of our exporting businesses that figure has now risen to 30.4% ??? broadly similar to France, Italy and Canada, but substantially behind Germany. This is why we announced in our new export strategy, the ambition for Britain to export 35% of our GDP.

Figures released last week showed another excellent performance by UK exporters over the past 12 months with goods exports up 5.6% ??? or ??18.6 billion ??? while services increased 5.3% or ??14.7 billion.

That means that since the time of the referendum we have added ??111.0 billion to our annual exporting total with all the financial implications on tax receipts that this brings. I will be setting out the wider implications of this for our economy and the fiscal position at the Mansion House on Wednesday, where I will be speaking alongside the Director General of the WTO, Roberto Azevedo. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

And in our improving export performance, what exactly did we sell? We sold almost ??50 billion worth of mechanical machinery, ??33 billion worth of cars, ??28 billion worth of electrical machinery and ??26 billion worth of pharmaceutical products. 

As a consequence, manufacturing order books are at their highest level for decades.

So much for those who say that Britain is not making anything any more.

Perhaps they should get out of their political bubble and go and meet some of the cutting edge, innovative and profitable manufacturers out there in the real world.

My only concern about this excellent picture is that much of the increase in the value of our exports has come from current exporters doing more rather than new exporters coming into the market. For example, while exports from the West Midlands rose 15.8% last year by value, the number of exporters rose by only 0.9%. We estimate that there are some 400,000 businesses in the UK who could be exporting but are not doing so.

The government is focused on helping more of them to take the plunge into exporting.

Britain's service sector continues to be in huge demand globally ??? from financial services to education, to life sciences, to accountancy, to law. In the knowledge economy Britain???s shelves are stacked with what the rest of the world wants to buy.

But while the proportion of our exports to open economies such as the United States, accounted for by services, is close to 60%, our service exports to China constitute under 18% of the total.  While this is currently a barrier to our increased success, I see this as an enormous opportunity for the future, with UK firms able to provide the sort of service support that a rapidly maturing economy needs.

That is why we must work tirelessly to improve global market access. Since the creation of the Department for International trade, ministers have undertaken 220 visits overseas to help achieve just that.

The scale of the opportunity is vast. Over the coming decades India, China and Africa will be markets where there are billions of middle-class consumers. To put these colossal numbers into perspective, by 2030 China will have more than 220 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants ??? the whole of Europe will have 35.

Let me give you a practical example of the opportunity. Currently 440,000 people are employed in agriculture and fishing in this country with farming adding ??11 billion GVA to the economy.

But, perhaps more importantly, it underpins the food and drink sector which provides more than 3.8 million jobs in this country and which adds ??27 billion GVA ??? more than the car and aerospace sectors combined. Countries around the world are increasingly looking to new protein sources for their people and Britain, with our ideal climate and soil conditions, is able to increase production to help satisfy this demand.

The recent agreement which I reached with my Chinese counterparts meant that the opening up of the dairy market was worth over a quarter of ??1 billion over the next four years to the Northern Ireland economy.

Such is the scale of the markets that relatively modest market access improvements can lead to enormous economic possibilities. We hope to see British beef on sale in China in the spring, opening up another massive market opportunity.

The government is ready to offer the help for businesses that we identified together in the consultation running up to the publication of the export strategy in the summer.

Businesses told us that they want us to better inform them about potential markets including regulatory and financial hurdles.

That is why we have upgraded our Great.gov.uk website. A new great.gov.uk performance dashboard indicates that there were 3.9 million unique business users to the service since it was launched in 2016, of which 29,100 businesses are registered. 

They told us that they wanted us to connect them better, which is why we have published an advance list of ministerial visits so that companies can lobby for better sectoral market access or to help get contracts over the line. 

And 15,399 export opportunities have been published in the last year, including tenders from a third-party feed.

They told us that they wanted better finance which is why we have made UKEF more available to SMEs than ever before with increased country limits and lending in local currencies.

In the current financial year, UKEF has supported 71 customers while in the past quarter, UKEF and DIT have collaborated to create a network of finance specialists in key overseas markets such as Brazil, Indonesia, Ghana, Turkey and UAE. The specialists help to identify new opportunities where the availability of UKEF's finance is a key factor in securing an export for the UK.

And they told us that they wanted better encouragement which is why we are setting up an online community so that businesses can talk to their peers and to those who have already successfully managed the challenges that they may face in exporting. 

Between February 2018 and May 2018, 493 GREAT branded events were held in 73 countries with highlights including the GREAT Festival of Innovation in Hong Kong and the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in London. All of these together can, and are making, a real difference.

Of course, market access, particularly in areas such as global services is not something we can do alone. Which brings me to my final issue ??? the need for an open, rules-based free trading system.

As we take up our independent seat at the World Trade Organisation in April next year, will do so as unashamed champions of the free trade system that has enabled us to take 1 billion of our fellow human beings out of poverty in the past generation, one of the greatest achievements in human history.

We will also continue to point out that trade is not an end in itself but a means to an end ??? a means of spreading prosperity ever more widely. That prosperity underpins social cohesion, that social cohesion underpins political stability, and that political stability is the cornerstone of our collective security. It is a continuum that cannot be broken without risking serious consequences.

That is why we must confront and oppose the voices of protectionism that are becoming ever louder in the trading environment. We are already seeing some of the consequences of global trading uncertainties with markets becoming unsettled about the future implications.

It is our national mission to ensure that the benefits of free trade which have contributed so much to the prosperity of our people, the liberation of the developing world and our collective security is protected and nurtured so that future generations can enjoy the benefits in the way that we have.