A US trade deal is good news for Britain

Now that America is offering a trade deal – or as John Bolton says, a series of mini deals – can the Brexiteers handle it? And ought the internationalist Remainers to welcome it? The topic tends to send leading figures from both sides into a spin, raising questions as to how prepared they are for what might follow. 

Many of those who are keenest to assert the importance of free trade with the EU tend to retreat in fright whenever the prospect of a trade deal with the US is raised. Exit the single market, they tell us, and Britain will face a shrinking economy, along with shortages of food and medicine. Negotiate a trade deal with the US, on the other hand, and we face the NHS being destroyed, as well as the population being forced to eat genetically modified food and chlorine-washed chicken. Brexiteers, meanwhile, are sanguine about tariffs on EU trade, while talking as if tariff-free American trade would be transformative.

The only way to square these two contrary positions is through the highly partisan politics of Brexit.