Senior Eurosceptic Conservatives have dismissed Barack Obama’s suggestion that the UK would be “at the back of the queue” in negotiations for a US trade agreement if it left .Cabinet ministers accused the “lame duck” US president of making meaningless threats to blackmail the British people into voting to remain in Europe. Others pointed out thatand the US had never struck a free trade agreement anyway, and claimed Obama was being manipulated by Downing Street.
Chris Grayling, the leader of the House of Commons, said: “We should not give up our independence just because of what President Obama said.”The intervention by Obama, who is popular in Britain, delighted the remain camp, but has left the leave campaign furious. “Barack Obama was doing an old friend a political favour,” said the justice minister Dominic Raab, referring to David Cameron.
You can’t say on the one hand that the US-UK special relationship is as strong as ever and always will be, and in the next breath say ‘take my advice or you go to the back of the queue’. I don’t think the British people will be blackmailed by anyone, let alone a lame duck US president on his way out.Raab’s stance was echoed by the Tory former defence secretary Liam Fox, who said Obama’s views would be irrelevant after the US presidential election.
“We have a referendum at the end of June, presidential elections are in November, so whoever it is that will be at the helm of the United States, it won’t be Barack Obama. So, to an extent, whatever he says today is largely irrelevant,” he told BBC2’s Newsnight. “It will be the next president, and the next Congress, who will be in charge of any trade arrangements.”
The energy minister Andrea Leadsom said: “The simple truth is that for years, the US and EU have failed to get a free trade deal organised. So the threat to the UK is meaningless from a president who has not delivered even for those who aren’t ‘at the back of the queueBut I think there’s a weird paradox when the president of the United States, a country that would never dream of sharing its sovereignty over anything, instructs or urges us politely to get more embedded in the EU, which is already making 60% of our laws.
I think the issue really is about democracy; America guards its democracy very jealously and I think we should be entitled to do so as well.Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, moved to switch attention to immigration as he insisted on Saturday that the government’s “national living wage” would provoke an influx of people from poorer EU nations.
I cheered the introduction of the national living wage, but when take-home pay in Britain is already more than five times higher than in the poorest EU countries, such a jump in wages will surely lead to another stampede to our borders. To make the living wage work for British people, we need to be able to control the number of people coming in.
Meanwhile, on the last day of his visit to London, which included attending a dinner for the Queen’s 90th birthday, Obama made an early-morning trip to the Globe theatre in Southwark. At the open-air venue, a reconstruction of the one where many of William Shakespeare’s greatest works were performed, he watched a series of scenes from Hamlet to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. Actors from a company of 16, who embarked on a two-year world tour in 2014 playing to more than 100,000 people in 197 countries, gave the performance specially for Obama
who watched intently and was seen swaying back and forth to the music.Clapping loudly at the end, he was invited to join the actors on stage. He said: “Let me shake hands with everyone. That was wonderful. I don’t want it to stop.The president then went to a town hall-style event in central London where he was answering questions from young people and was due to meet the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.Obama will end the day at a dinner with Cameron and the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun, at the envoy’s residence, before travelling to Germany on Sunday.
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