London: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office has defended his Brexit deal with the European Union (EU), after US President Donald Trump warned it would make it impossible for the two nations to strike a future trade agreement.
The US president waded into the British election campaign Thursday to criticise Boris Johnson’s divorce terms with the European bloc. “This deal… you can’t do it, you can’t trade. We can’t make a trade deal with the UK,” Donald Trump said.
But a Downing Street spokesman later said the deal would allow the UK to strike ‘our own free trade deals around the world from which every part of the UK will benefit’.
Trump’s comments appear at odds with his previous pledge in September that he was working closely with Johnson to strike a ‘magnificent trade deal’ once Britain left the EU.
Trump also launched a stinging attack on UK’s main opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and urged Johnson to unite with euro-sceptic hardliner Nigel Farage, a key figure in the 2016 referendum on European Union membership.
“James Corbyn would be so bad for your country,” Trump told Farage during a phone interview broadcast on his talkshow on British radio station ‘LBC’. “He’d take you in such a bad way. He’d take you into such bad places. I’d like to see you and Boris get together… I think it’d be a great thing,” Trump added.
Farage, whose new Brexit Party is campaigning for Britain to leave the EU without any deal in place, has urged Johnson to form an electoral alliance but has so far been rebuffed. He is due to launch his party’s election campaign Friday.
Johnson agreed new divorce terms with the bloc’s leaders earlier this month, ahead of the country’s scheduled departure Thursday. But he was unable to push the plan through parliament and instead opted to hold a snap pre-Christmas election, blaming his Labour rivals for the latest Brexit delay and promising to now take the country out by a new January 31 deadline.
“If you vote for us and we get our programme through, which we will, we can be out, at the absolute latest, by January next year,” Johnson asserted during a campaign stop at a hospital.
AFP
