Gavin Grey: UK correspondent on Donald Trump agreeing to extend EU trade talks after earlier tariff threat

US President Donald Trump has agreed to extend a deadline to negotiate tariffs with the EU until July.

Last week, Trump expressed frustration with the pace of talks and threatened to raise the tariff rate to as high as 50 percent as soon as June 1.

UK correspondent Gavin Grey says this will be a significant relief to parts of Europe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Devin Gray are UK correspondents with US Elogevin Hi. The
so all it took was a very good phone call
with Donald Trump. Yeah, so it would appear so overnight
news here coming in that the EU is going to
be given more time with the US to try and
come to some trade deal. And that's been after some

(00:22):
pretty sparky exchanges between the pair. Just looking back at
the history of all this, of course, Donald Trumper announced
last month of twenty percent tariff on most EU goods.
It was later half to ten percent, allowing time for
more negotiations. That ten percent was going to run until
the eighth of July. Then on Friday he said, I'm
really really frustrated with the negotiations. He says, the EU

(00:45):
is just playing along, and so he said, right, we're
going to slap fifty percent tariffs on by the first
of June. However, over the weekend it would appear, as
you said, a good phone call between the European Commissioner
Ursula vonder Lion and Donald Trump, in which they now
have put things on ice, and it looks like that

(01:05):
they are going to continue discussing things with a new
deadline of the ninth of July. Donald Trump long criticizing
what he says is an unfair trade relationship with the EU.
In other words, the US imports more from the EU
than the other way round. But at the moment, at
least more time for consultation, which will be a huge
sigh of relief for some countries across Europe. What are

(01:27):
we expecting the out of the Supreme Court today? Very
interesting judgment coming up here. There's a lot of detail
in this and I'll try and keep it simple, but basically,
two former city finance traders were jailed in this country
for rigging the interest rates, in other words, fixing them
artificially to create a bigger fees. However, there have been

(01:49):
concerns raised by senior politicians here that they may have
been series of miscarriages of justice. Now, in all, there
were nine criminal trials, and if the Supreme Court rules
that there has been a miscarriage of justice, it could
lead to a quashing of all the remaining convictions. Now.
Tom Hayes is the name of a former trader at

(02:10):
the Swiss Bank UBS. He became the first banker to
be jailed for rigging interest rates back in twenty fifteen.
He was accused as well in the United States of
being a ring master of an international fraud conspiracy and
sentenced to fourteen excuse me, sentenced to fourteen years in jail.
He was not alone. But since then there have been

(02:32):
all sorts of talks about actually they were encouraged by
the governments of their own countries to do this, and
actually what they did wasn't illegal. It was just a
bit naughty sort of thing. So that's what the Supreme
Court is looking at today. But as I said, far
reaching consequences for the other court cases that involved this
so called rigging scandal. Kevin, what do you make of

(02:52):
this renationalization of Southwestern Railway? Yeah, fascinated this. So the
railway here were always, of course in the government hands
until under Margaret Thatcher's government it was decided that they
were going to be privatized, but not all the train
services were privatized to one company. In fact, it was

(03:13):
split to about a dozen different companies. So if you
were going on a long journey, you may well be
buying a ticket, but in fact that money would be
split between the different train companies operating the different routes.
It's never been perfect by any means, but a lot
of people believe it was a lot better than under
the days of the old British rail were the new

(03:33):
government Labor government always said when these contracts come up
for renewal, we will renationalize, and the first contract for
south Western Railway, which operates services out of London to
the southwest of England, has now expired and has now
become renationalized. It's very interesting the first of many contracts

(03:53):
coming up in the next year or so, and interesting
that the Transport Minister wouldn't say what it would mean
for ticket prices, but did say it would mean more
money invested in the railway infrastructure. Either way, Labor, the
party that's come up with this, I think, is going
to have to show people that it is better under nationalization.

(04:15):
But plenty of people with a long memory Heather will
think back to those days in the seventies early eighties.
I think it was when frankly British rail well, it
seemed to be not working more the days than it
was working. However, one sad reminder the very first service,
the early morning service that started well, there was a
bit of a train, but then you had to get

(04:35):
on a bus because they were doing work on the line. Annoying. Hey,
thank you very much, Kevin, appreciate it. Kevin Gray, how
UK correspondent. For more from Hither Dupless Elan Drive, listen
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