Speeches by Bryant.

“Poor old Elizabeth Barrett!”

“We have obviously had one gain already in relation to beef—I was licked a lot by some beef cattle the other day on a farm outside Dorking. The US produces a great deal more beef than we do, but I think our product is materially different. It is for a very specific market, and I hope it is going to do very well. The DEF…”

“Some of them are inevitable areas in which there might be red lines on either side of the conversation. The classic instance, which has been referred to many, many times in the public domain, is what tends to be characterised as hormonal beef and chlorinated chicken and so on. We have made it absolutely clear from the …”

“I do not accept that. I have not had any indication, and nor has anybody in the Department, from anybody from the United States of America that the process that we are engaged in at the moment, of trying to secure the best economic prosperity deal for the UK, is not on track.”

“Okay.”

“If we have anything different from DSIT, we will let the Committee know.”

“But in relation to an aeroplane, for instance, what is a European aeroplane? When any of the European countries go round the world trying to persuade countries to buy Airbus, 30% of the aeroplane is likely to be made in the UK, because the wings will have been here or the engines may have been made by Rolls-Royce here …”

“If I do SPS first, as I said earlier, the EU Commission got its mandate in November for negotiation on SPS, so we are undergoing that process at the moment. We have said that we want to complete that by the time of the next EU summit, which will be later this year. We still hope to be able to have all the legislation i…”

“I certainly have not been to one. Kate?”

“It is certainly true that we have discussions. I myself have not seen those two things connected, and I do not think that we have, but Kate will answer in a moment. It is certainly true that one of the things that the US has regularly said, in Senate hearings and so on, is that it wants us to dismantle some of what it …”

“No, I do not accept that. That is certainly not the view when I have spoken to my German counterpart, my—I could go through a list, and I am quite happy to provide the list if that is something that is useful to you, of other countries that we have spoken to.”

“I would say that work is ongoing on chunks of it. I note that the US has said that it is paused, but there are substantial chunks of it that are still proceeding.”

“It is a chunk of things that have been enabled by co-operation between the two Governments and would not have happened without that co-operation, although they are in the commercial interests of both ends of the equation.”

“No. I was going to come on to the point about automotives because I met Willie Bain and others and the SMMT on Thursday afternoon, I think—the day after the Accelerator Act had come out—or maybe on the Wednesday. I can’t remember; it was one or the other. They made those points, and we have registered the points as wel…”

“This is primarily a DSIT lead, rather than DBT, but because some of it was announced around the same time as our work on the economic prosperity deal, it has sometimes got conflated with it. I am happy to make sure that you get any information from DSIT that you want. Kate, is there anything that you want to add?”

“Well, my understanding is that the research that is being done with TAE Technologies and the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s joint venture partnership to commercialise fusion technology in the UK is still proceeding. Kate Joseph indicated assent.”

“There are lots of bits of it. It is a series of chunks; bits of it are still progressing, and other bits are—I think the Americans themselves have used this term—“paused”. For instance, in our work on quantum research we are still moving forward.”

“That is not me announcing a tariff; it is just saying that I can be absolutely certain that there will not be a gap.”

“I do not think that it is going to get worse in the sense of the cataclysmic version that you laid out there, but I will go through the individual issues. Let me start with the Accelerator Act. This is a draft; it’s a first draft. You know the processes through the European Union. We had been engaging with the European…”

“India’s tariff, as you know, is going down from 150% to 75%, and then in later years down to 40%. We have also secured geographical identification in Argentina for Scotch whisky. We work on this all the time—it feels like it is one of our best clients.”