US-UK Trade Deals in Jeopardy After Britain Axes Negotiators

The goal was for America to be Britain's gateway to the sunny uplands of Brexit. Subsequent Conservative administrations have lowered their goals by attempting to establish deeper ties with certain US states as dreams for a free trade agreement vanished.

An enraged British businessman called the dismissal of the civil personnel in charge of carrying out those state-level deals "an act of arson."

Out of 150 trade postings, more than one-sixth have been eliminated from British consulates in the US, resulting in the loss of 24 jobs and other openings. Barely two weeks had passed when Rishi Sunak announced the general election.

Many of the trade teams, based in the nine consulates across the US, had worked on trade pacts with Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, jetting around America to sign memorandums of understanding with governors of states including Florida, Indiana and Oklahoma.

But more importantly, according to British business leaders in the US, the regional trade directors and their staff had decades of experience and had built up contacts with American businesses from Google and Meta to the heads of Hollywood studios.

Jules Ehrhardt, a designer and investor, said there was “outrage and disbelief in the British business community” at the decision.

“They are tossing out collective centuries of relational and institutional knowledge core to the UK-US trading relationship,” he said. Ehrhardt moved to the US in 2012 to open the American arm of Ustwo, a digital design studio behind award-winning games such as Monument Valley, and worked with Google, Nike and Twitter, before founding a venture capital firm, FKTRY.

He said the consulate directors had “served as the connective tissue” between British and American business leaders, making introductions, giving advice and lending their expertise. “We shot ourselves in both feet by undermining Britain’s ‘gateway to Europe’ status for American companies following Brexit, and were told to go west, and now we’ve self-elected a lobotomy,” Ehrhardt said.

“This [is an] act of arson in the final stages of this government. We claim it is a special relationship, yet remove our people at the very heart of it.”

Allan Rooney, founder of Rooney Law, which has helped more than 300 companies from the UK, Ireland and Australia enter the US market, said the directors were “absolutely critical in building strong and mutually beneficial trade relationships between UK and US businesses”.

“The facilitation of strategic introductions that these directors provide is a massive benefit,” he said. “They plug companies into a market they otherwise don’t know anything about. They familiarise them via trade missions and other methods to support and understand the market and the subtle differences between the UK and the US ‘doing business’ culture. Removing that layer will impact trade relations.

“More than a million Brits are employed by American businesses – I can’t think of a more important trade relationship post-Brexit. It’s critical. And I think the removal of a very large swathe of intellectual capital and institutional knowledge is potentially worrisome. It could strain the trade teams who are already short on resources.”