Bombardier says more about aircraft makers’ dirty tricks than the future of UK-US trade

‘Bombardier exposes post-Brexit realities’ was the FT’s headline after the Trump administration imposed a 300 per cent tariff on sales of the Canadian manufacturer’s C Series aircraft into the US, threatening 4,000 Bombardier jobs in Northern Ireland. Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar weighed in: ‘There’s been a lot of talk of a new trade deal between the UK and the US and how great that would be for the UK, but we are now talking about the possibility of a trade war.’ The truth of this story, however, is that it tells us little about prospects for the future US-UK trade accord occasionally mentioned in the US President’s tweets — other than, perhaps, that he will never agree anything that doesn’t visibly put ‘America first’ and doesn’t give a hoot whether what he says today is consistent with what he tweeted three months ago.

The UK interest in the Bombardier dispute is, in that sense, largely a matter of collateral damage in continuing tensions on two fronts.