Sunday, August 04, 2019

New Trade Minister Liz Truss Had Private Talks in US with Libertarian Groups


THE OBSERVER: Fears for weakening of UK’s food safety and animal welfare standards in any deal with America

The cabinet minister in charge of negotiating a new US trade deal met with a series of rightwing American thinktanks to discuss deregulation and the benefits of “Reaganomics”, new documents have revealed.

Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, had a number of meetings with libertarian groups that have championed parts of Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda and tax cuts.

New details of her three-day visit to Washington last September have been uncovered by Greenpeace’s investigative journalism team, Unearthed. Truss met senior representatives from the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank committed to shrinking the state and cutting environmental regulation, to discuss “regulatory reform”. Also at the meeting was the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Both groups were part of the “shadow trade talks” project, designed to advocate a wide-ranging US trade deal allowing the import of American goods currently banned in Britain. » | Michael Savage | Sunday, August 4, 2019