A Republican senator is moving to put Britain at the front of the queue for trade talks as it negotiates its withdrawal from the European Union.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said that Brexit will boost the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the UK, and has already tabled a bill, along with Senator Mike Lee, calling on President Obama to open trade talks immediately.
Speaking in an interview with the Sunday Times, Senator Cotton said: “Great Britain is going to be just fine charting its own path in the world, and it may well work out in the British people’s long-term benefit to be of Europe but not in the EU.”
“History is made by men and women who reclaim their national sovereignty over some of the most fundamental questions of economic self-governance,” he added, claiming that Britain and America have more in common with each other than the EU.
“It might in the end result in a closer US-UK trading relationship without the super-regulatory state that the EU and Brussels have become.
“The US and the UK typically have more of a market-based approach, and we might be able to eliminate the few remaining trade barriers that we have.”
Sen. Cotton also said that he would welcome any attempt by the new Prime Minister Theresa May to forge closer ties with the U.S., adding that EU bureaucracy would never be tolerated in America.
“I have been sympathetic for a long, long time to complaints from not just the UK but other European nations about the sometimes high-handed and overbearing attitude in Brussels,” he said.
“It’s hard to imagine many Americans would submit the decisions of our Supreme Court for instance to a court in Canada or Brazil, that would submit our decisions in Congress to the legislature of Guatemala or Argentina.”
He went on the criticise the EU as undemocratic, and said that what remains of the bloc urgently needs to tighten its borders.
“The EU really needs to focus on securing its borders [and] giving its citizens basic security, whether it’s from increased crime by the migrants who have arrived over the past year, from the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.”
He also called on it to “fix national economies, which have such high unemployment and low growth — as opposed to concerns about what containers olive oil are served in or the way cabbage should be shredded.”
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