Crucial post-brexit trade talks face setback as six US states are forced to delay trip to Britain

CORONAVIRUS has hit the UK’S postbrexit trade ambitions after a delegation from six US states cancelled a visit to London for talks this month.

Representatives of Virginia, Oregon, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Maryland had been scheduled to meet Department for International Trade (DIT) officials to discuss opportunities for state-level agreements with the UK, expected to be worth billions of dollars.

The idea of the Government negotiating with individual states as a backstop while it tries to strike a free-trade deal with the whole US was promoted by former trade secretary Liam Fox.

Allie Renison, head of trade policy at the Institute of Directors, said of the outbreak’s effect on trade talks: “If this becomes the new normal that becomes a huge issue for the Government.”

A spokesman for OCO Global, a trade and investment consultancy firm that works with the DIT and was facilitating the officials’ visit, said: “Engagement and negotiations between US states and the UK will continue with both sides committed to developing trade opportunities which will provide economic prosperity.”

Meanwhile yesterday, former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King urged ministers to put a transatlantic partnership between the City and New York ahead of financial relations with the European Union.

The Brexit-supporting peer, who led the Bank until 2013, slammed the EU’S financial watchdogs for veering down “a road of increasingly detailed and often pointless directives that offer little protection to retail investors but add to the costs of the system”.

Writing for Bloomberg he said a nodeal outcome would be better than agreeing to the EU’S current demands.