Biden dashes trade deal hopes ... and will lecture us on Brexit

JOE Biden has blocked hopes of a swift US trade deal, Liz Truss revealed yesterday – as he prepared to lecture her over Brexit.

Speaking ahead of a meeting with the US President in New York, the Prime Minister said that talks on a post-Brexit trade deal had effectively been abandoned.

Miss Truss said she did not expect talks to resume in the ‘short or medium term’, as sources said they may not resume for years.

Trade talks with Donald Trump reached an advanced stage, with hopes of an outline deal only knocked off course by the pandemic. But President Biden, who opposed Brexit, has made clear that he wants to focus on domestic problems rather than seeking new trade agreements.

Miss Truss said the UK would focus instead on striking deals with India, Gulf states and members of the 11-strong Trans-Pacific Partnership which includes Australia, Mexico, Canada, Singapore and Japan. One source said that Miss Truss’s comments were a ‘recognition of reality’.

The White House yesterday said President Biden planned to use talks to press the PM to back away from unilateral action to override the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Miss Truss has pledged to ‘fix’ the arrangement, which has led to onerous EU checks on goods traded between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan last night said Mr Biden would ‘communicate his strong view that the Good Friday Agreement... must be protected’.

Miss Truss said she still hoped for a negotiated settlement on the long-running border issue. Speaking to reporters en route to New York, she suggested today’s meeting with President Biden would focus mainly on security.

‘The number one issue is global security and making sure that we are able to collectively deal with Russian aggression... working together with other members of the G7 to make sure we are not strategically dependent on authoritarian regimes,’ she said.

ON the face of it, ruling out any immediate prospect of a trade deal with the US would seem to be a serious economic setback.

As a new agreement was considered a prime post-Brexit objective, Miss Truss’s decision to put negotiations on ice has been greeted with predictable derision by the Remainer chattering classes.

In reality, however, it is a shrewd piece of strategic thinking.

There was next to no chance of getting a deal anyway while Joe Biden, an ardent Irish Republican, is in the White House.

Now at a stroke, Miss Truss has shown she will not be blackmailed by the US President, who has intimated that any agreement would be conditional on Britain kowtowing to the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

But is delaying a deal really such a disaster? The EU doesn’t have one. Furthermore, we already have a massive trade surplus with America, based on financial and legal services which have never required a deal – and still don’t.

Meanwhile, Labour and the Lib Dems are crowing that not having an agreement amounts to failure. Yet they have consistently opposed one by spreading scare stories that the UK market would be flooded with cheap chlorinated chicken, and parts of the NHS would be flogged to US private firms. What hypocrites.

We will get our deal eventually, but the timing must be right and it has to be of mutual benefit. We should not take one at any price.