There is little to no chance of the UK signing a post-Brexit trade deal with the United States anytime soon, Prime Minister Liz Truss has admitted amid rocky relations between the two powers.
Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has now publicly admitted that there is little chance of a UK-U.S. trade deal being signed anytime soon.
Although the prospect of such a trade deal was a significant aim of many Brexiteers in the country, the opportunity to sign one with Trump’s America was squandered by a British government disinterested in actually making Brexit work. Now, rocky relations with the country’s ruling Democratic party have seemingly jeopardised any hope of an agreement now, with the White House even issuing threats about delaying or scrapping negotiations over the UK’s refusal to bow to Brussels over Brexit.
To make matters worse, politicians have now accused U.S. President Joe Biden of snubbing Truss, after the commander-in-chief cancelled a bilateral meeting between himself and the Prime Minister, despite such a meeting being arranged in parallel with the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.
Now, according to a report by The Guardian, Liz Truss has admitted that achieving the much sought-after trade deal with the United States was now looking extremely unlikely ahead of another meeting with the President in New York.
“There aren’t currently any negotiations taking place with the US and I don’t have any expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term,” the publication reports Truss as telling journalists.
The Prime Minister instead said that her meeting with Biden would focus mainly on international security, as well as the ongoing war in Ukraine, with Truss traditionally being seen as rather hawkish towards the ongoing conflict with Russia.
While the Prime Minister will no doubt find common cause with the Biden administration on this issue, it seems unlikely that said camaraderie will be enough to ease ongoing tensions between the two nations over ongoing disagreements to do with Brexit.
In particular, the United States has taken major issue with the UK’s handling of Northern Ireland, which has largely remained in the hands of the European Union under the Northern Ireland Protocol previously agreed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
However, Westminster officials are now adamant that not only is the established agreement with Brussels to do with Northern Ireland no longer working, but is actively endangering the fragile peace established in the deeply sectarian region in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with Pro-UK Unionists feeling like they have been cut off from the rest of the UK by the protocol.
As a result, Liz Truss has since repeatedly taken measures to single-handedly rip up the arrangement without EU approval, a move that has deeply angered President Biden — who has repeatedly described himself as being ‘Irish’ — as well as the rest of the Democratic establishment, who have insisted that any change must be first approved by Brussels before being implemented.
The Biden White House has since issued multiple veiled threats against Britain over the diplomatic spat, insisting that the Truss administration bow to Brussels’ will over the spat or see any chance of a UK-U.S. post-Brexit trade deal disintegrate.
“There’s no formal linkage on trade talks between the US and the UK and the Northern Ireland protocol, as we have said, but efforts to undo the Northern Ireland protocol would not create a conducive environment, and that’s basically where we are in the dialogue,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre previously said in regards to the political feud.
Such hostile sentiments have been just another element Liz Truss has been forced to juggle in the early days of her time as Prime Minister, with the politician admitting that the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II has caused problems for her nascent government, which has had to set aside politics to manage the death of the long-lived monarch.
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