Henry Bolton, leader of the Our Nation Party has commented on the potential of increased US influence in the UK, and the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.
Sputnik: Do Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s points regarding the potential of increased US influence in the UK following Brexit have any validity?
Henry Bolton: What he’s referring to of course is that the UK post-Brexit will be looking for a trade deal with the United States, and in any trade deal there is give and take, it is a negotiation that’s what negotiating a trade deal is all about.
What Jeremy Corbyn is referring to, and what a lot of people are concerned about is the United States is such a massive economy, a strong and dominant economy, and it’s very important for the UK to have a deal, so he’s suggesting that the United States will actually have far too much weight in those negotiations and will dominate them to their advantage and our disadvantage.
On the other side of it, if we believe Donald Trump; he has already stated that the trade deal can go in sectors, and so it will be a lot easier to negotiate step by step, so I think Jeremy Corbyn and the people around him at the moment are playing to their agenda with this, to talk this up, the potential difficulties and challenge there, but I think they are over-egging it.
Sputnik: Is the EU itself also subject to strong US influence?
Henry Bolton: There’s a treaty in the EU, Article 34, which requires every member state to coordinate its foreign policy with all of the others, and so with that in mind we are already subordinate to somebody else’s foreign policy to a large degree.
Outside the EU, but not tied into a legalistic framework with the United States, we would be a lot more independent in terms of our foreign policy than we are now.
Sputnik: Is a no-deal Brexit now inevitable?
Henry Bolton: Everybody talks about a deal, and that’s a legacy word if you like from Theresa May, who was using it to refer to the withdrawal agreement, and that was effectively a treaty, which I think is now history.
There are some seventy-odd technical agreements of various sizes that we’ve already got with the EU for post-Brexit, these are things that allow our ships to dock at European ports and vice versa, our aircraft and so on. So there is no such thing as no deal, there is such a thing as no treaty deal.
We will have a deal of some sort, or a number of deals of some sort and we will not leave with absolutely no deal in place.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of Henry Bolton and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.