Starmer's trade deals FIASCO: 'Win-wins' are just sugar-coated concessions

Daily Mail​

07-06-2025

Keir Starmer has sought to portray his hastily stitched together trade deals with the United States, the European Union and India as unalloyed triumphs. The way he tells it, you'd think he is so persuasive at the negotiating table that he could sell ice to Eskimos and sand to Arabs.
But the truth is that a Prime Minister in need of an economic success story to sell to an increasingly disillusioned electorate has sugar-coated the outcomes of these talks and misleadingly presented them as 'win-wins' for UK plc.
In fact, he has been bamboozled and outmanoeuvred at every turn by representatives of foreign powers who really do know how to play hardball.
Take the French president Emmanuel Macron's outrageous piece of brinkmanship over fishing rights.
Aware of how desperate the embattled Starmer was to announce a new trade deal with Brussels, he ambushed him at the 11th hour with a demand that EU fishermen be given further rights to our waters for 12 years.
No wonder one member of an influential French fisheries committee later gloated: 'We couldn't have hoped for better.'
And what did we get in return? A vague promise to allow British travellers to use e-gates at European airports at some unspecified point in the future.
Starmer's willingness to sign agreements that have concessions to the other party baked in – but only airy promises about reciprocal benefits – is a feature of all the deals he has signed to date. The American deal, for example, has more holes than a sieve.
Under the terms of the 'US-UK Economic Prosperity Deal', we were told that Britain would be freed from a 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium, for example. (A tariff, incidentally, that was later doubled to 50 per cent but is currently on hold until July 9.)
The dash for a carbon-free economy means that there is only one UK blast furnace producing vital virgin steel currently operating at full capacity. As a result, the White House is concerned about the prospect of Britain sending cheaper imported steel to the US that has been pressed or rolled in this country.
So the US negotiators are insisting that only steel that is 'melted and poured' in the UK (in other words, smelted in a furnace) is covered by the trade deal.
All very well, but one of Britain's biggest steel exporters is Tata Steel. It shut down its blast furnaces at Port Talbot in South Wales last year, so must currently import raw steel from the Netherlands and India – both subject to American tariffs. This is a knotty problem – and the clock is ticking. Unless an agreement can be reached by July 9 when the new tariff rates kick in, Britain's steel exports will be hit by that punitive 50 per cent rate.
So much for the US deal. The EU one is even worse. While Starmer surrendered to Macron's ultimatum over fishing, Brussels remained characteristically obdurate when it came to its €150 billion (£125 billion) defence fund.
Despite the growing threat from Russia, the US's coolness towards Nato and Britain's leadership in high-tech warfare – not to mention our control of the Eurofighter Typhoon platform – Starmer extracted only the woolliest of commitments from the EU. The bloc merely said the new deal 'will pave the way' for Britain's defence industry to participate in the EU's fund.
There were similarly weasel words when it came to the use of e-gates by British travellers to the Continent. Under the terms of the deal, access would be given as 'soon as possible', yet we could be queuing for years to come.
Even the recently agreed trade deal with India has its critics. It included an extension from one to three years to a scheme that offered Indian workers employed here on a temporary basis an exemption from National Insurance Contributions – a totally toxic clause given Chancellor Rachel Reeves' now notorious October Budget, which raised Employer National Insurance Contributions.
What is particularly shameful is the dishonest way in which the Government has presented the deals to the British people as if they are a big win for everyone.
Tell that to the working men and women and fishing crews whose livelihoods are threatened by the weakness and incompetence of the man at No 10.