Trump poised to announce US trade deal with UK
President Trump will announce a US-UK trade deal today, according to a New York Times report which has since been backed up by Sky News.
In a post on X, Sky News’ Sam Coates said that the claims are “substantive”, and that the announcement today would be “a ‘heads of terms’ agreement rather than the full thing”.
Trump had already suggested that an Oval Office announcement of a trade deal announcement was coming at 10am ET – which is 3pm UK time – posting on his Truth Social platform that there will be a “big news conference”.
The US President said that there would be news of “a major trade deal with representatives of a big, and highly respected, country”.
Sir Keir Starmer said in a speech at the London Defence Conference at King’s College: “As you know, talks with the US have been ongoing. You’ll hear more from me about that later today.”
Former Conservative trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said in a reply to Coates on the social media platform that the initial deal would be an “agreement in principle”, or “AIP”.
“But the details have yet to be hammered out and that can take a while, along with the legal paperwork which is intensive,” she added.
The UK has been subject to the baseline 10 per cent tariffs since 2 April, when Trump announced his menu of ‘Liberation Day’ levies.
Following the media reports, sterling has risen 0.4 per cent against the dollar.
Trade triumphs?
This is a deal that successive UK governments have been looking to forge since Theresa May’s government kicked off talks in 2017 – again, with Trump in charge – and the deal gained little momentum in the latter half of Trump’s first term and flatlined under Biden.
Aspects of the deal have been variously controversial, from the prospect of chlorinated chicken on British shelves, to the implicit show of support for Trump.
The opposition Liberal Democrats have consistently called on the government to bring any deal before the House of Commons for a vote.
Even Sir Keir Starmer’s foreign secretary David Lammy has spoken out against a UK-US trade deal in the past, arguing in 2019 that “a trade deal with Donald Trump will mean US corporations get to privatise and dismantle our NHS one bed at a time”.
Scoring a US trade deal would amount to the second time in a week that the UK has seen its biggest trade breakthrough since Brexit, after the government announced a trade deal with India on Tuesday.
The deal with India was three years in the making, with Starmer healing the agreement for “reducing trade barriers” with India.
Though the government claims that the India deal would give the UK a £4.8bn boost, from projected bilateral trade of as much as £25.5bn, there has already been controversy around possible national insurance exemptions – slammed by Nigel Farage as a “big tax exemption”.