The Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce United Kingdom has said the trade announcement with the USA is “not exactly brilliant news”.

Speaking on GB News, Lord Karan Bilimoria said:
“We’ve just had the announcement of the UK – India Free Trade Agreement, which started in early 2022 when I was president of the Confederation British industry and has concluded now when I’m chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, the ICC UK.

“[This] is not a free trade agreement, but a trade agreement with the United States of America. Let’s put this into perspective. The United States has always been, as a single country, the biggest trading partner of the UK by far, and we’ve never had a free trade agreement with the United States of America. They’ve still been our number one trading partner.

“Our biggest trading partner by far, Brexit or no Brexit, is the European Union with 45% of our trade at our doorstep.

“Yet now we have a situation with America, we’ve had a surplus in trade with America. In fact, in goods, it’s pretty balanced, about £60 billion we export to America. We import £58 billion from them.

“And our average duty with America both ways was about 2.5 per cent. So from 2.5 percent you go to 10 percent. I mean, that’s jumping up by four times. Forget the 25 percent that was imposed on cars and steel.

“So to say to a deal now where you got things at 10 percent, that is four times higher than we were before, in a country with which we’ve got a balanced trading relationship anyway.

“And when it comes to services, we’ve got a huge surplus for the United States of America, where we export £130 billion, compared with about £50 billion we import.

“We’ve got a big services surplus, so something like a film tax would be very damaging to us, let alone anything like 100 percent because we’ve never had taxes on services before.

“So this is not a great scenario to be in to start off with, given our historic relationship with the United States of America.

“And the next thing to put into perspective is that America, yes, is a massive country. But the whole of the European Union, 27 countries and if you add the United Kingdom into that, what the whole European Union was, the American economy is bigger than all 28 countries put together. That’s how big it is.

“And yet, America only makes up 13 percent of global trade. 87 percent is still all the other countries in the world.

“So we’ve got to always just step back and see where we are now. America is disrupted. I mean, Donald Trump is, ‘let’s cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’ and completely disrupted the world trading system with the tariff wars that are in existence now.

“But the world is already adjusting. You’ve got huge trading blocks like the EU and China that make up 30 percent of world trade. Then if you take the ASEAN countries as well, you’ve got 50 percent of world trade, and then you take the whole of the world, apart from America is 87 percent.

“So the world will adjust to this and where the UK is concerned, this new agreement, yes is better than having 25 percent on steel – of course that’s good news for our steel manufacturers. It’s better for car manufacturers to go down 10 percent. But we were 2.5 percent before.

“It’s still much higher, so it’s not exactly brilliant news.”