US-UK trade deal

Campaign group Global Justice Now has accused Boris Johnson’s government of pushing ahead with an extreme US trade deal without a mandate from the public or parliament.

Trade campaigners have reacted with fury to the long-delayed results of the Department for International Trade’s four public consultations on post-Brexit trade deals, released today. They accuse the department of planning to ignore hundreds of thousands of responses demanding that the public is given a say over future trade deals, and expressing concern over the prospects for food standards and the NHS.

Global Justice Now has launched a legal challenge at the Information Rights Tribunal over the Department for International Trade’s failure to release details of numerous trade meetings it has held with the United States and other countries since the EU referendum in 2016.

Campaigners have this morning dropped a ‘Dump Trump’s trade deal’ banner from Tower Bridge in London in protest against a US-UK trade deal, as Donald Trump arrives in Britain for a three-day state visit.

Liam Fox’s mission to Washington DC appeared to end in failure yesterday, as no progress was made in his attempt to be granted an exemption to Donald Trump’s steel tariffs. Having labelled the tariffs "absurd" on BBC Question Time last week and boasted they were the reason for his trip to Washington, Fox's statement on the talks consigned the issue to a virtual footnote.