News Analysis
A
Squeezed Britain Ekes Out 3 Trade Deals. But Are They Any Good?
Prime
Minister Keir Starmer’s government had to make some politically fraught
concessions, reflecting the country’s status as a midsize economy in a volatile
market.
Mark Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/world/europe/uk-starmer-eu-deal.html
May 20,
2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
Striking
back-to-back deals with the European Union and the United States, Britain
showed that it didn’t have to choose between its two largest, mutually
antagonistic trade partners, after all. It could, as its ambassador to
Washington, Peter Mandelson, once said, “have our cake and eat it.”
But the
limited scope and occasionally stingy terms of these deals, both of which
required painful concessions, attest to Britain’s diminished position in the
post-Brexit era. Far from being an agile free agent that is able to strike
opportunistic deals, as Brexiteers once predicted, Britain finds itself
squeezed between dueling heavyweights.
“If it is a
cake,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the political risk consultancy
Eurasia Group, “it isn’t a very tasty one.”
That isn’t
to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s two agreements, as well as a third
with India, aren’t evidence of negotiating agility. His deal with President
Trump was the first Mr. Trump made with any country since imposing
across-the-board tariffs on dozens of trading partners. The agreement with the
European Union, which Mr. Starmer announced on Monday, is the first significant
new deal between Britain and the E.U. since the trade accord that enshrined
Brexit in 2020.
Each has its
selling points, whether it is the E.U. allowing British travelers to use
electronic gates at some European airports — shortening maddening lines for
vacationers — or the United States reducing tariffs on Jaguars, Land Rovers and
other British luxury cars bound for the American market.
“We’re
demonstrating that it is not a binary choice between the U.S. and E.U.,” said
Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics at King’s College London. But he
added that Britain faced “a much more constrained set of choices.”
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The deal
with the United States, for example, still leaves Britain worse off than it was
before Mr. Trump took office, saddled with a basic 10 percent tariff on
exports. Likewise, Britain had to make concessions to get back some of what it
used to get automatically as a member of the European Union.
While the
agreement with Brussels will generate nearly 9 billion pounds, or $12 billion,
worth of benefits a year by 2040, according to the British government, it will
add just 0.2 percent to Britain’s gross domestic product. Brexit cost the
country 5.5 percent of its G.D.P., according to a 2022 study by the Center for
European Reform, a research center in London.
To close the
deal with the E.U., Mr. Starmer made a politically fraught concession: allowing
European trawlers to fish in British territorial waters for 12 years in return
for reduced trade barriers for British food entering the single market. And to
get a partial reprieve of American tariffs on British autos, Britain granted
greater access to American beef, ethanol and agricultural products.
Such
trade-offs reflect Britain’s sobering reality as a midsize economy operating in
a world of three gargantuan trading blocs: the United States, the European
Union and China. Adding to the challenge: One of these giants, the United
States, has thrown out the rule book governing global trade.
This is not
the world that Brexit’s champions had imagined when they argued a decade ago
for Britain to leave the single market. They said that Britain, unshackled from
the bureaucracy and regulations of Brussels, would be able to cut favorable
deals, including with the United States. Mr. Trump, in his first term,
applauded the Brexit project and held out the prospect of a trade deal as a
reward.
Britain’s
agreement with India, announced this month, offers some vindication of the
Brexit case. Mr. Starmer could not have made the deal, which will halve duties
on British whiskey and gin, as part of the E.U.
“It was
plausible to say that the U.K., with an open, midsize economy, could do as
well, or better, in a rules-based international order by being agile and
flexible rather than being a member of the E.U.,” Professor Portes said. “But
that world is gone, at least for the moment,” he added. “We’re now in a much
more difficult environment, and the U.K. has to find its way.”
When Mr.
Starmer came into power last summer, he made clear he wanted to reset Britain’s
relationship with the E.U. while preserving its status as perhaps the closest
ally of the United States. He has stuck to that position, even after the return
of Mr. Trump, who upended the global trading system and has threatened to
withdraw support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
What began
as a balancing act has turned into a tightrope walk. Mr. Rahman said that in
trade negotiations, Britain was being “squeezed between a very mercantilist
E.U. and a very predatory, hostile U.S.”
The European
Union, he noted, views the deal Mr. Starmer negotiated with Mr. Trump as a bad
one, which it does not plan to replicate. Given Mr. Trump’s antipathy for
Brussels, it is not clear he would agree to a similar agreement with the E.U.,
though its larger size gives its trade negotiators greater leverage.
The tensions
between Washington and Brussels added to the pressure on London. British
officials, Mr. Rahman said, believed they had to conclude a deal with Mr. Trump
before Monday’s summit between Britain and the E.U. or risk antagonizing him
with images of Britain rekindling its relationship with the bloc.
Ultimately,
the calendar mattered less than the basic power dynamic. E.U. officials may use
more diplomatic language than Mr. Trump’s aides, but the bloc’s officials were
hardly less aggressive, especially in pushing Mr. Starmer to accept a lengthy
extension of European fishing rights in British waters.
Britain’s
newspapers, many of which lean toward the opposition Conservative Party, were
quick to condemn Mr. Starmer for “selling out” Britain’s fishermen. The Daily
Telegraph said on Monday that he had tied the hands of future British
governments with the fishing deal. Boris Johnson, the Conservative former prime
minister who first used the line about “having your cake and eating it” in 2020
to promote his own Brexit deal, castigated Mr. Starmer’s updated version as
“hopelessly one-sided.”
Mr. Starmer
insisted that fishermen would benefit because the reduced barriers to food
exports would allow them to ship more seafood to continental Europe. He
portrayed the two deals, plus the one with India, as evidence that Britain was
doing exactly the kind of opportunistic deal-making the Brexiteers once
envisioned.
“Britain is
back on the world stage, working with our partners, doing deals that will grow
our economy and putting more money in the pockets of working people,” he said
at a news conference, flanked by Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the
European Commission, and António Costa, the president of the European Council.
“This is a
new beginning,” Ms. von der Leyen said, “for old friends.”
Mark Landler
is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well
as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a
journalist for more than three decades.
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