US-UK trade deal could take years, warns senator

By Pa
March 21, 2019

LONDON: Britain could wait for years for a trade deal with the US after Brexit because Donald Trump will struggle to push it through Congress, a member of the Senate

Advertisement

Foreign Relations Committee has warned.

The US president has bolstered hopes for a swift deal in recent days, with tweets declaring his ambitions for a “large-scale” agreement of “unlimited” potential. But Democrat Senator Chris Murphy said there was deep concern on both sides of the aisle in Congress that doing a deal with the UK before the EU would be “a gift to Russia”, by encouraging other member states to break off from the European bloc.

While shying away from ex-president Barack Obama’s warning that the UK would be “back of the queue” for a deal, Murphy said Congress — which must give its approval to any trade agreement — would “think very carefully” before allowing London to take precedence over Brussels.

If the EU deal came first, he warned, “my worry is that Britain doesn’t have that time — if there’s a semi-hard departure from the EU and the economy starts to suffer in major ways here — waiting two to three years for an agreement with the US”.

Murphy was in London for talks with Prime Minister Theresa May’s effective deputy David Lidington and other key MPs, before flying to meetings with the Northern Irish parties in Belfast and the Irish government in Dublin.

He told reporters he wanted to be sure that public opinion in the UK was aware of the potential obstacles in the way of a US trade deal. And he said he was advising all the contenders for the Democrat nomination for next year’s presidential election of the need to put an EU deal first if they take control of the White House.

The Connecticut senator said the Trump administration had so little credibility with Brussels that a new administration may be needed to make any headway — possibly delaying talks on a UK/US deal as late as 2024 if Trump wins a second term.

The prospect of a swift deal held out in the president’s tweets was “not realistic”, Murphy said. “We’ve learnt not to pay too much attention to the president’s Twitter feed,” he said.

“There is not a lot of connection between what he tweets and what he does. So just because the president’s tweeting that he’s going to go gangbusters into a US/Britain trade deal doesn’t mean that he’s going to, nor does it mean Congress will follow.”

Murphy said it was “guaranteed” that Congress would oppose a trade deal with the UK in the case of “a hard Brexit which would blow up the the peace process” in Northern Ireland. “Trump has worked himself into a box where he is demanding a hard Brexit which would shatter the peace process, which would then quell any interest in Congress to support a trade agreement with Britain,” he said. “There’s a circular firing squad here that the president has created.”

But he said Congress was also alive to the danger that prioritising a UK trade deal over one with Brussels would give Moscow “another arrow in its quiver” in its efforts to destabilise the EU.

Advertisement