Trade talks with Sir Keir Starmer and  US President Donald Trump, are they real??

Civil Servants have warned that Britain may well be hit by Trump’s threatened global tariffs on what the US president calls “liberation day” on Wednesday. We will carry on talking to get the best possible deal for Britain.” Starmer, who has had regular phone calls with Trump in recent weeks, has said that Britain would be “pragmatic and clear eyed” in its response if exports of UK-made cars and other goods are hit by US tariffs.

And yet, Trump has apparently suggested a free trade deal with UK according to the press releases, can you trust Trump is the question.

Lord Peter Mandelson, well there’s a name from the past, twice sacked by Tony Blair’s Labour Government, now Britain’s ambassador to Washington, can you believe? So much for a new style Labour Party!

Mandleson is seeking to engineer an economic deal that would see Britain given a carve-out from Trump’s threatened reciprocal global tariffs. Britain has spoken to the Trump team about scaling back or axing its digital services tax, which is set to raise £800mn this year and particularly affects big US tech companies. But the UK car industry told Sarah Jones, industry minister, on Friday that it did not want to see immediate UK retaliation if Trump presses ahead with his threat of 25 per cent tariffs on foreign-made cars entering the US.

“The industry does not want a trade war, but it’s important that we keep all options on the table,” Starmer said last week.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, has warned that Britain’s GDP would be 1 per cent lower next year in the event of the most “severe” global trade war. That would almost eliminate UK chancellor Rachel Reeves’ £9.9bn of headroom against her fiscal rules, announced last week in the Spring Statement, and increase the likelihood that she would have to raise taxes in an autumn Budget.