President Donald Trump had “a very good dialogue” with Britain’s Prime Minister, who was “very happy” that his country wasn’t on the U.S. list of punishment tariffs.
The European Union reacted with horror at the United States levying a 20 per cent tariff on its exports, a rate twice that of former-member the United Kingdom, which is in the lowest bracket worldwide of ten per cent. The British government has, apart from cursory and general remarks against tariffs in principle, avoided such histrionics, and now President Trump has said he believes the country will have been very happy to get that outcome.
The remarks came on Air Force One on Thursday evening, and saw President Trump reflect of the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer: “…we have a very good dialogue going, and I think he was very happy about how we treated him on tariffs”.
Nevertheless, the United Kingdom government had hoped to avoid tariffs altogether by agreeing to a trade deal with Washington before the coming of Liberation Day. The fact the UK & U.S. haven’t had a trade deal signed and sealed for several years now is a huge indictment of the failure of the last Conservative government, at the very least, which was charged with delivering Brexit, but couldn’t get over its own opposition to leaving the European Union, nor its barely disguised distaste for term-one President Trump himself.
‘Attack on the Global Trade Order’ Cries German Chancellor, Warning Trump’s Tariffs ‘Fundamentally Wrong’ https://t.co/mtLlALXElo
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 3, 2025
Incredibly, Conservative lawmakers this week have even had the nerve to criticise Labour for not getting a trade deal in months that their party failed to agree on in the years it was in power.
The present left-wing Labour government in the UK has little to nothing in common with Trump, but at least is determined to be pragmatic enough to work with him, and to get a trade deal to potentially side-step tariffs altogether. Having missed this first deadline, it is believed in London that this deal can now be achieved “within weeks” to get the UK below ten per cent tariffs, The Washington Post notes.
While the UK is not alone in taking this conciliatory approach to Trump to cement a place as a preferred partner, it is a small club. As reported, Australia, which are also working to achieve the same goal, has taken a similar tactic.
Illustrating the utility of tariffs as an engine of change, President Trump also said the tariff announcement has resulted in a stampede of countries beating a path to his door to try and strike new deals to minimise their own exposure. He said: “Every country has called us, that’s the beauty of what we do, we’ve put ourselves in the driving seat. If we’d asked most of these countries to do us a favour, they’d have said no, now they’ll do almost anything for us… the tariffs give us great power to negotiate”.
The President said he’d be willing to cut a deal in return for something “phenomenal.” Even for a close U.S. ally like the United Kingdom, there is speculation that the two countries’ growing divergence on the meaning of freedom, and particularly the observance of freedom of thought and expression in practice, could be a stumbling block to getting an even better deal on trade.
President Trump rejected the notion that tariffs would be ultimately damaging, using the metaphor of the economy as a sick patient who has to undergo serious surgery, which will be shocking but will put them on the road to recovery. He said: ” We inherited a terrible economy, as you know, with a lot of problems, including the loss of manufacturing and plants closed up and down the country. We’ve lost 90,000 plants since NAFTA… and about six million jobs, it’s a sick patient that went through an operation on liberation day, it’s going to be a booming country”.
Any business that wanted to dodge tariffs had to do nothing more complicated than open a factory in the United States, he said.
