The Biden administration torpedoed a post-Brexit free trade agreement between the U.S. and the UK on Tuesday, suggesting it may not be “relevant to the needs of our people”.
United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai told British Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan that a free trade deal is not worth spending “years and a lot of blood, sweat and tears” — even going as far as to suggest that it was a “very 20th-century tool”.
While this will be devastating for Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it should not be unexpected as U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted that a trade deal with Britain is not a priority for the Democrat-run White House — echoing former President Barack Obama’s warning that Brexit would put the United Kingdom at the “back of the queue” for a trade deal with America.
Britain squandered their chances of securing a free trade deal with the United States as by delaying the Brexit departure date from 2016 to 2021, failing to capitalise on President Donald Trump’s premiership.
“We look forward to negotiating a tremendous new deal with the United Kingdom. They have a wonderful new Prime Minister [Boris Johnson], he wants very much to make a deal, as they say,” said President Trump, who had a much more positive view of Britain than his successor, at a conference in Davos in January 2020.
Biden has historically expressed scepticism about Britain’s relationship with America, even once refusing to take part in a BBC interview after his election, implying he could not spare a substantive comment for the British broadcaster because he was “Irish” — although the first of his family to settle in America appears to have been an Englishman.
Despite indications that Britain and America may be past the era of the “special relationship” with Joe Biden in office, the U.S. did announce they will be dropping tariffs on British steel (25 per cent duty) and aluminium (10 per cent tax), which were put in place in 2018, the Daily Mail reports.
In return, Britain will be removing tariffs on American brands such as Levi’s jeans, bourbon whiskey, and Harley Davidson motorbikes.
Biden also snubbed Britain by removing a bust of British war-time leader Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when he moved into the White House, which had been reintroduced by Trump after Obama originally removed it.
While Johnson had previously ripped into Obama for removing this bust while an MP, as Prime Minister he was reluctant to critique Biden for the same inflammatory action in an effort to preserve British-American relations.
“Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire — of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” Johnson wrote in the right-leaning British newspaper The Sun in response to Obama’s actions in 2016.
“Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen as less important than he once was. Perhaps his ideas were old-fashioned and out of date. Well, if that’s why Churchill was banished from the Oval Office, they could not have been more wrong,” Johnson insisted.
Biden’s allies have suggested the current President, who was Obama’s vice president, has not forgotten these comments, negatively impacting America’s relationship with Britain.
The 79-year-old Democrat has also previously overstepped by interfering with Britain’s Brexit negotiations with the European Union, warning any hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland would damage British-American relations, but appearing to put all the responsibility for compromising on London and none on Brussels.