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News Analysis
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government had to make some politically fraught concessions, reflecting the country’s status as a midsize economy in a volatile market.
May 20, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
Striking back-to-back deals with the European Union and the United States, Britain showed that it didn’t have to choose between its two largest, mutually antagonistic trade partners, after all. It could, as its ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, once said, “have our cake and eat it.”
But the limited scope and occasionally stingy terms of these deals, both of which required painful concessions, attest to Britain’s diminished position in the post-Brexit era. Far from being an agile free agent that is able to strike opportunistic deals, as Brexiteers once predicted, Britain finds itself squeezed between dueling heavyweights.
“If it is a cake,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, “it isn’t a very tasty one.”
That isn’t to say that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s two agreements, as well as a third with India, aren’t evidence of negotiating agility. His deal with President Trump was the first Mr. Trump made with any country since imposing across-the-board tariffs on dozens of trading partners. The agreement with the European Union, which Mr. Starmer announced on Monday, is the first significant new deal between Britain and the E.U. since the trade accord that enshrined Brexit in 2020.
Each has its selling points, whether it is the E.U. allowing British travelers to use electronic gates at some European airports — shortening maddening lines for vacationers — or the United States reducing tariffs on Jaguars, Land Rovers and other British luxury cars bound for the American market.
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