Robert Kennedy Jr will take on influential lobbyists for pharmaceutical and food companies - Yorkshire Post Letters

Please allow me to congratulate Andy Brown for his remarkable ability to psychoanalyse Donald Trump (‘Weak Starmer at Trump’s mercy over US trade deal’, The YP, December 9).

“He is only interested in how much he can get out of any deal and in taking advantage of any weaknesses he detects,” writes Mr Brown, who then goes on to criticise some of Mr Trump’s intended appointments to his Cabinet, but quoting hearsay rather than facts.

There are too many non-sequiturs in Mr Brown’s arguments to be able to list them all, but the key point of his article is his warning that any potential trade agreement with the United States would be one-sided in America’s favour and that instead we should seek a trade agreement with the European Union.

Putting aside whether the latter is possible, if a trade deal with the USA were to be harmful to British interests, that would be purely the fault of the British government that negotiated it.

The idea that “Keir Starmer places us at the mercy of Donald Trump” doesn’t come into it if the British negotiating team is up to the job. They will have the ultimate power of veto over a bad deal.

On the other hand, if we had still been members of the European Union, we would have had very little influence, as one of 28 states, on any trade agreement that might have been negotiated between the EU and the USA.

Mr Brown has criticised President Trump's nominee for Health Secretary, Robert Kennedy Junior, claiming that he is anti-vaccine.

However, I would advise your writers and correspondents to look more carefully at what Kennedy says.

“President Trump has given me three instructions: He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies; he wants to return the agencies to the gold standard, empirically-based, evidence-based agents in medicine that they were once famous for; and he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years,” Kennedy said after Trump's election.

Does Mr Brown or anyone else disagree with those three aims?

The major American pharmaceutical and food companies are hugely influential lobbyists on Capitol Hill. But they should not be given carte blanche. From now on, I don't think they will be.