Well, well, well. While Rachel Reeves enjoys a week in Washington DC at the International Monetary Fund spring talks, back in the UK concerns are mounting about what concessions Britain will have to make to enter into a trade deal with Donald Trump’s America. Fears are growing about what Trump’s current tariffs will means for the future of Britain’s car industry while farmers have raised concerns about chlorinated chicken and food standards. So, on Wednesday, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey quizzed Sir Keir Starmer about whether he would commit to a parliamentary vote on whatever economic deal gets arranged with the US. The Prime Minister, however, remained curiously non-committal…
‘Will the Prime Minister guarantee a vote in this House on any trade deal that he agrees with the United States here?’ Davey probed Starmer in the Commons yesterday. While the PM first acknowledged that the Lib Dem man’s point was of ‘real interest and importance’, he rather vaguely went on: ‘We will negotiate, as he would expect, in the national interest… We are making progress on that. And then there will be a process if a deal is reached.’
Davey wasn’t impressed and was quick to take to Twitter to question: ‘If the government really thinks it’s a good deal for Britain, what are they so afraid of?’ Certainly it’s quite the change in stance from the Labour lot, given just four years ago their former shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry had made similar demands of then-trade secretary Liz Truss on the UK-Australia trade agreement. ‘There is only one question that matters today,’ Thornberry had remarked in the Commons in 2021:
Will she guarantee to give parliament not just a debate, but a binding vote on the deal that she has agreed with Australia so that we can reject the terms that she has agreed on farming, and send someone else back to the table to get a better deal for our country?
At the time, Truss poured scorn on Thornberry’s ask, slamming her for being ‘relentlessly negative’ about the deal she had negotiated – to much annoyance on the Labour benches. Yet now the shoe is on the other foot, Labour seems to lost its enthusiasm for parliamentary votes on deals like these. How the tables turn, eh?
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