Donald Trump’s proposals for a trade deal with the UK after Brexit would lower food standards, increase NHS costs and bankrupt British farmers. It’s yet another example of how we will be poorer and weaker after Brexit.
The US Trade Representative has published a 15-page wish list for planned trade talks. Beneath the friendly rhetoric about how Brexit provides a “new opportunity to expand and deepen the US-UK trade relationship” lurks a rather different agenda. If Trump gets his way, the UK will be hurt in six ways.
We’ll be bullied
The UK will have less leverage in trade talks because the EU is the world’s largest single market with 500 million people. Outside the EU we will be a market of just 65 million people. The US economy will be five times bigger. America’s president dislikes imports and loves exports. As the UK has a trade surplus with the US, he will want the UK to give a lot of market access for little in return.
Chlorine-washed chicken
Trump wants lower food standards so US producers can export more easily to the UK. His ambassador to the UK characterises EU farm animal welfare standards as “protectionist”. The reality is different. Insanitary conditions for poultry production mean US farmers wash their chickens in a chlorine solution.
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Bankrupt farmers
Weaker regulation would make it harder for British produce to be exported to the EU, where 60% of our food and drink exports go. The combination of this and cheap imports from the US could lead our farmers to fold (see paragraph 62).
Dearer drugs for NHS
Trump wants American pharmaceutical giants, whose inflated prices are unregulated in the US, to have “full market access” to the UK. This is an attempt to stop the NHS keeping the price of drugs down through its huge buying power. US regulators are prohibited from using the kind of clinical and cost-effectiveness rules that the NHS uses.
Weaker consumer protection
The US wants the UK to dump EU business regulations and adopt US ones instead, weakening protection for consumers. What’s more, British business would be at risk of unfair competition from cheaper US goods while Trump wants to continue to use “national security” as a catch-all excuse to bump up tariffs on foreign imports.
Buy America, bye-bye Britain
The US president wants access to the £284 billion a year UK government procurement market while maintaining “buy America” policies at home. So the NHS might have to include US firms in any tendering exercise while British ones would remain excluded from many lucrative US government markets. Meanwhile, our companies will lose access to the £1.5 trillion procurement market in the rest of the EU after Brexit.
Trump’s trade wars with China and the EU are contributing to the worst trade crisis since 1945. After Brexit the UK will be vulnerable to Trump’s playground bullying, under pressure to back his claim that China is not a market economy and without the benefit of the EU’s ability to get the kind of good trade deals they have recently agreed with Canada and Japan.
Be careful not to choke on that chlorine-washed chicken now.
