By Beth Rigbypolitical editor

Scenarios range from full-scale trade wars to more lightly protectionist measures, which the UK has already faced under the Biden administration.

“It’s hard to say what this will mean for us now,” a senior government official told me. “There will be trade implications, but it is not clear whether these will be uniform tariffs that trigger a trade war with China that we all feel the pain of or mildly protectionist measures, as the United States for years.

“In the nightmare trade scenario of huge tariffs… if that happens, Brexit will look like a paper cut.”

For the UK, outside the EU and facing China and the US, tariffs could be particularly severe and cause difficulties domestically.

As a major trading nation, tariffs would have significant inflationary effects on goods.

“It would have a big impact on how we confront China and Europe and create retaliatory trade wars,” said a person familiar with the scenario planning.

“It forces us to choose. Do we face America more, do we face China more?

“We are exposed as a trading nation because we are relatively small between the EU, China and US bloc. So we will be disproportionately affected and we don’t have any big friends to trade with. make friends, so we’ll be stuck.”

It’s also unclear how closely the uniform tariffs are tied to the highly touted post-Brexit trade deal that Trump once held but President Joe Biden did not.

The Labor government is currently unsure how this might be revisited, or whether it wants it to be, in light of Trump’s protectionism and Labor’s red lines on opening the NHS to the pharmaceutical industry private sector or agriculture to imports of genetically modified products.

The prospect of punitive tariffs to force the UK to negotiate is the complete opposite of what the government wants.

However, could there be a happy medium?

A government official says there could be opportunities for cooperation on security or technology that would be different from a full trade deal.

There is some hope that negotiator Trump will be open to such rapprochements.