UK companies lobby Mike Pompeo to ease travel restrictions and end tariff dispute
A group of prominent UK companies used a meting to pressure US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and foreign secretary Dominic Raab to ease aviation restrictions and settle a long-running tariff dispute.
Members of the BritishAmerican Business (BAB) lobby group met with Pompeo and Raab in London yesterday to discuss the two countries’ future trading relationship and ongoing negotiations for a UK-US free trade deal.
BAB’s membership includes some of the US and UK’s largest companies in sectors such as aviation, financial services, telecommunications and technology.
City A.M. understands that attendees of the meeting expressed concern about current travel arrangements between the countries, telling Raab and Pompeo that they needed to come up with “creative solutions” to resume travel.
One attendee told City A.M. that they were “obviously concerned about people’s health and the need to protect that”, but that the current situation was doing untold damage to businesses on both sides of the pond.
One solution raised was having regional quarantines, whereby travel could resume between certain low-risk areas of the two countries.
Before the Open newsletter: Start your day with the City View podcast and key market data
Another key issue raised was the ongoing dispute between Airbus and Boeing, which has led to tariffs on some European products imported to the US.
The US has imposed punitive tariffs on $7.5bn (£6.1bn) of EU goods, such as Scottish whiskey, French wine and Airbus aircraft.
Some attendees told Pompeo and Raab to get on with settling the trade dispute before any UK-US trade deal is signed.
A source at the meeting said the tariffs “would really put a dampener on any deal”.
“The tariffs are so significant that the companies affected by it would get no significant gain from the trade agreement,” they said.
David Henig, trade expert and UK director of the European Centre For International Political Economy, said he did not believe solving the trade dispute was a high priority for the UK or the US.
He added: “Companies have worked out that it could take a while to do a UK-US trade deal, but they’ll want to make things better for themselves as soon as possible by lifting those tariffs on whisky and other goods.
“It does not look like lifting those tariffs are a priority fort the US or UK.”
It comes as the Financial Times reported yesterday that senior government figures did not expect a UK-US trade deal to be completed this year.
Last year, some government figures said the aim was to have a deal done this year, however this was always considered unlikely.
Some of the key sticking points in negotiations are agriculture exports from the US and digital services.
Speaking yesterday, foreign secretary Dominic Raab said: “There are, every morning, just under 1.5m Americans who go to work in British companies, around the same number of Americans going to work for British companies and I think that illustrates the kind of win-win trade deal we’re committed and determined to achieve between our two countries, good for jobs, good for consumers as well.”