‘A Trump Trade Deal Would Open the UK’s Doors to the Big Tech Robber Barons’

Peter Mandelson has a dream. The original spin doctor and Tony Blair’s former communications guru is now Britain’s ambassador to the USA. And in Washington DC, he’s dreaming about a “full spectrum technology partnership between Britain and America”, one which rivals the nuclear partnership of the 1960s.

This time, the partnership could encompass genomics, protein design and engineering, artificial intelligence, data centres and quantum computer, and more nuclear technology. 

And the deal that could give this vision lift-off, Mandelson has dubbed the ‘Make our Economies Great Again’ agreement. 

This deal is already more than a figment of Lord Mandelson’s imagination. Since Keir Starmer’s Oval Office visit, US and British negotiators have been trying to put flesh on the bones of such an agreement. Starmer views it as a way of removing Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs. And he might succeed in the short-term, but in the process he will have given away vitally important tools that we need to rein in the Big Tech monopolists and regulate their technologies.    

What’s more, Trump is a bully. He is partly using tariffs as a revenue raiser to cut taxes on his oligarch friends. But he is also using them to blackmail foreign governments into making concessions that run counter to their interests. 

In essence, he wants the rest of the world to pay for tax cuts for America’s super rich. And if he sees the British prime minister roll over, he’s unlikely to stop there. 

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What is the Deal?    

The UK has twice tried to agree a trade deal with the US. The first was TTIP, the EU-US deal, of which Peter Mandelson was a leading champion. The second attempt, post-Brexit, fell apart when Trump was voted out of office. Both prospective deals became deeply unpopular with the UK public after they realised that they posed a threat to public services, farmer’s livelihoods and food standards – threatening to unleash chlorine-washed chicken and similarly unsavoury products onto Britain’s supermarket shelves.

This time, Starmer and Mandelson want to focus more on “clicks and portals than goods and mortar.” There is no evidence that Britain will be able to limit a deal in this way, in fact Trump has already said that Britain should accept chlorine chicken if they want to reduce tariffs. But even if they could, a digital-only trade deal carries serious threats for UK citizens, workers, public services, the environment and democracy itself. This would not be a deal that helps build a strong British economy, but an extreme liberalisation deal that hands even more power to US corporations. 

Any deal would be based on a wishlist dreamt up by the Big Tech giants over the last decade. In essence they have learnt from the pharmaceutical corporations who, in the 1980s and ‘90s, worked to get politicians in rich countries to use enforceable trade rules to cement the monopoly power of their businesses across the world. The result is the dysfunctional industry that produces our medicines today – highly financialised giants, addicted to sky-high profits, yet unable to make the medicines we needs at a price we can afford. 

Similarly today, Big Tech wants to enshrine its monopolies, in perpetuity, through a series of trade rules. Their wishlist was pushed as US policy in Trump’s first term, but Biden’s administration dropped it, saying countries had to balance trade objectives with “the right to regulate in the public interest and the need to address anticompetitive behavior in the digital economy.”

However, amid a surge in lobbying from the Big Tech industry, Trump has moved in the opposite direction, loosening controls on AI and weakening data protection. He is now shifting digital trade policy back to its original position, backed by the oligarchs – the richest men the world has ever seen – who stand behind his administration. 

What a US Trade Deal Could Mean for Britain 

We already know that Britain’s digital services tax will need to be dropped or significantly reformed as a price of any trade deal. The tax, expected to bring in £5 billion by 2030, goes some way to offsetting the notorious levels of tax avoidance by the Big Tech industry. It’s currently set at a mere 2%, and at a time when we’re slashing international development budgets and support to those with disabilities, we should be raising it not abolishing it. 

Instead, Trump is insistent that “only America should be allowed to tax American firms.” Starmer’s government has therefore acknowledged that the tax is therefore on the table, and seems willing to give Elon Musk’s X a big tax cut as a price for tariff reductions.  

What’s been less discussed is the rest of the Big Tech wishlist. 

Starmer has said, with an unfortunate turn of phrase, that he wants AI “mainlined into the veins” of the nation. AI and other digital technologies may well offer the potential to improve public services. But this can only happen if we can make them work in the public interest. But that’s precisely what Big Tech wants the UK to give up. 

Only two years ago, experts warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” and called for AI to be “managed with commensurate care” rather than developed as an “out-of-control race.” Trump disagrees, and he has rescinded the Biden administration’s model for restraining AI. He wants Britain to follow suit, and a trade deal would lock that direction into place.   

Big Tech has other demands to – for instance public procurement ‘rights’, which would make it harder to refuse US corporations tenders on any basis other than that they offer the lowest price. And they will certainly demand our data must be allowed to flow completely freely into the US, including data gathered through the NHS and other public services. 

In concrete terms, that means governments being unable to protect how our data is used. Big Tech could export medical records to the US, and use them to create new products to sell back to the NHS at unaffordable prices – something British health secretary Wes Streeting has admitted – rather than us being able to use that data to build our own medical knowledge and infrastructure.  

Big Tech also wants rules that ban governments from demanding to see ‘source code’ and ‘algorithms’ used in digital products. That’s important because without that right, regulators would be unable to understand limitations and vulnerabilities of technologies that may be unsafe or unfair. It would like them trying to regulate vehicle safety without being able to look under the car bonnet. 

Now bear in mind that these technologies could be used to make life and death decisions about, say, welfare, immigration and policing. It would be folly to allow a situation where the code that determines these decisions in not available for scrutiny. Yet that’s what these digital trade rules do.   

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The New ‘Robber Baron’ Era

Then there are a whole host of bigger picture issues. In the late nineteenth century, a small group of businessmen captured the American economy. They were labelled the ‘robber barons’ and became synonymous with obscene levels of wealth and inequality and the capture of politics by private interests. 

This is the position occupied by Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos today. They have not only used their control of these technologies to amass unimaginable fortunes, their power at this point is a threat to our democracy. As with the original robber barons, we need to bring them to heel, by taxing, regulating, breaking them up and taking them into public ownership. But a trade deal will make all of that that harder. 

Amazon, Meta, Apple are experts at locking us into their brand and cementing their power – whether through proprietary plugs, preventing us repairing the stuff we own, or dictating awful terms to small business. Governments are beginning to take action against these practices. But trade rules will help the corporations challenge that action, allowing them to claim it is ‘discriminatory’ and to evade regulation by preventing them even having to set up a local presence in the UK.   

This will also make it much harder to build a UK tech industry because under trade rules, we’re unlikely to be allowed to preference UK companies or local suppliers, nor to apply limits on the size or types of companies that can operate in a sector, nor to mandate use of open source software. Neither would we have full control over that valuable asset – our own data – which could be used to boost our own digital economy. And it would make it harder to realise workers’ rights or environmental protections in a handful of corporations that we have no control over. 

Time to Stand Up to Trump’s Bullying

Trump’s tariffs have set the global economy alight. Few countries want a trade war. But the trade war is here anyway, and there are no painless options going forward. So rather than giving into Trump’s blackmail, we must stand up to this bullying. Because even if it was acceptable to trade away our democratic rights to decide how we regulate new technologies, that will not be the end of the matter. Trump will come back for more. And he will continue to hold the threat of tariffs over our head. For all its bowing and scraping, Britain got no special treatment from Trump on ‘liberation day’. 

A better way forward is to stand up to this bullying, showing solidarity with all those affected, especially the poorest. After all, Trump’s harshest tariffs have been reserved for global south countries who will suffer decimation of industries that they have come to depend on. 

Living in an economy which is under the control of the big corporations has got us to the catastrophic point we are at. Further fuelling the rule of the robber barons would be foolish in the extreme. So let’s ditch liberalisation and instead work to restructure the international economy, allowing governments to intervene, plan and work together to protect people and the planet. That doesn’t mean matching tariffs for tariffs, but it might mean using a wide array of policy tools, including restricting access to US financial corporations, overriding intellectual property, and restricting data access, as our neighbours are already contemplating. 

Lord Mandelson has always believed there is no alternative to liberalisation. That attitude has produced the economy we have today, one presided over by men so rich they truly form a new oligarchy. It has also produced the anger which has given us Donald Trump. We must not let the UK Government hand these men even more power, and instead stand up for the sort of economy that puts people first.