CGTN Europe spoke to Allie Renison spoke to Director, SEC Newgate and former government trade adviser
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00:00Let's talk to Ali Renison, the director of the global communications company SEC Newgate
00:06and a former trade advisor to the UK government. Ali, welcome, good to see you. Do you think this
00:11is all just a negotiating ploy from the Trump administration and in a month's time we'll be
00:16talking about very different figures? I mean I think it depends on what the area is. For steel
00:22and aluminium we've seen this happen before effectively. This is version two. So this is
00:28not the first merry-go-round on steel and aluminium. I think when you're looking at
00:32some of the other sort of extractions of leverage that Trump is trying to get,
00:37there's more foreign policy issues on border security, on migration. So I think it depends
00:41on the types of tariffs but we know that he's long had an issue with the amount of
00:45steel that he thinks and some manufacturing lobbies think is being dumped in the US market.
00:50So just how significant will the impact of US tariffs be on European businesses and
00:54which sectors, you mentioned steel, which other sectors are likely to be hit the hardest?
01:01Well I think it depends on the response effectively because at the moment we know
01:04that steel and aluminium are the kind of the aluminum sectors where the EU produces a lot
01:09of these commodities to send to the US and as a competitor effectively are a big issue.
01:13I think the retaliation that the EU might take is what might affect what sectors are really
01:18kind of hit. Obviously there are manufacturing industries that import from the European Union,
01:24they process it, they kind of they use it in their assembly but if you're looking at what
01:28the EU might do to retaliate then there's a possibility that we'll start seeing retaliatory
01:32tariffs on areas like whiskeys, on cars and suddenly the scope of that trade war becomes
01:36much bigger. The UK is outside the EU post Brexit, where does this leave the UK? Could
01:44these tariffs perhaps have a knock-on effect for the UK given our close ties with Europe?
01:50Yeah, I mean the UK's had a very, the government's had a very heads-down approach right now in terms
01:55of how it tries to engage with the US. You know it's a much smaller share of UK exports
02:00in steel and aluminium that are going to the US market. Having said that, the level of our
02:04integration with European supply chains and there's a lot of steel traded between the UK
02:09and the EU, we are a big sort of intermediate market for some of that, that potentially has
02:13a knock-on effect on raising the costs and prices for businesses and therefore for consumers being
02:19passed along those tariff cost heights. Realistically what options does the EU have
02:25to respond to these US tariffs? Well you can do retaliatory tariffs, there are sort of broader
02:32trade defence measures, they've strengthened their arsenal, which basically means that there are other
02:38tools in the toolbox to try and basically cut off some of US access to the European market
02:43and some of it may not be immediate actually, some of it may be if you're looking at sort of
02:47the divergences in AI, we've heard EU leaders talk about making it harder for Elon Musk's
02:52sort of social media platform to operate in those markets. So there's a lot of different ways in
02:56which we can respond that aren't just trade specific. In a previous life you were a former
03:00trade advisor to the UK government, if you were back in one of your old jobs what would you be
03:06telling these governments? I mean how should Europe prepare for potential long-term disruptions to
03:13transatlantic trade? Diversify, diversify, diversify and I do not mean by the state and
03:20sort of the government forcing companies to relocate sort of you know anything out of the US,
03:24but I think that now is the time for the trade agreements that were stalled between the EU and
03:28the UK and countries like Canada, they need to be revived, they need to be looking at sort of
03:32alternative markets to do effective deals with, it's all about the and not just the or.
03:38Ali, good to talk to you. Ali Renison, the director of the global communications company
03:42SEC Newgate, former trade advisor to the UK government.