By Mark English, Policy and Media Advisor to European Movement UK (personal views)

To make smartphones, electric cars, military hardware and much else, you need minerals known as ‘rare earths’. You need to mine them, refine them and put them into the components that many modern products rely on.

China has lots of rare earths. Australia, India, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine have some. Africa has some – though often in countries under Chinese influence.

The US doesn’t have enough. That is why President Trump flew to South Korea – a shorter hop for President Xi – to meet the Chinese leader on 30 October. He was there to persuade China to lift its ban on rare earth exports, a measure which the US think-tank Brookings described as ‘China’s ace of spades’.

Xi agreed, to sighs of relief from governments and manufacturers worldwide. In return, Trump had to back away from his bombastically aggressive trade policy towards China.

This averted a shutdown of car plants and other industry not only in the US but also in the EU and UK. It seems – for now – the Chinese and Americans do not want to hobble our economies.

A more conciliatory policy towards China is not the only way US appetite for rare earths is driving Trump’s policy. His ‘deal’ with Ukraine and threats to Greenland and Venezuela are not unconnected to those places being home to rare earths.

The EU also has nowhere near enough rare earths. But it is moving heaven and earth (sorry!) to expand access to them and to set up processing plants on EU soil. The EU is bringing its geopolitical clout to bear, for example through its Critical Raw Materials Act.

Once upon a time, the UK would have been at the centre of this EU strategy. Now, we are on the periphery. We have few rare earths in the UK and minimal capacity to mine and process them. Worse, we are too small to elbow our way to the front in the global race for access.

The only route to the UK securing the rare earths and other resources that we need to prosper lies in closer cooperation with our neighbours in the European Union.

The EU can also benefit from having the UK in its corner at the global negotiating table, from restoring seamless trade with the UK and from the UK being a stable partner, rather than an unpredictable neighbour in decline.

For now, politics and the need to rebuild trust dictate a gradual approach.

But the reset in EU-UK relations must be the start, not the end. It can restore only a small fraction of the economic growth the UK threw away with Brexit.

Even more importantly, just as the global economy depended on coal 150 years ago, still today our most modern industries depend on raw materials found in the ground. This time, those raw materials are not conveniently situated under the UK. We do not have an Empire to grab them from elsewhere.

The EU, in contrast, is a powerful single market, external trading bloc and geopolitical actor that offers China, the US and others opportunities they cannot do without. It has the size to stand up to Xi, Trump and their successors.

Isolated from the rest of Europe, the UK risks fighting a losing battle for critical resources – human and technical as well as mineral - with the EU and other global behemoths all lined up against us.

The bottom line is simple. The UK’s future as a viable hi-tech economy depends on getting much closer to the EU and ultimately becoming part of it again.