Boris Johnson’s ruthless reshuffle makes one thing very clear: Brexit is about giving the right wing of the Tory party “the chance to finish the Thatcher revolution”. Johnson filled his government with ultra-free market ideologues such as Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, who in 2012 vowed to give a good kick to the great British public, who they described as “among the worst idlers in the world”. Their plan to “unchain Britannia” by declaring war on the “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” is actually a plan to unchain big business, which they believe, astonishingly, has suffered from masses of overregulation on the part of successive governments from Tony Blair to David Cameron.

Right at the ideological heart of this group is Liz Truss, founder of the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs. Truss is a turbo-charged Thatcherite who has now replaced Liam Fox as international trade secretary. She has repeatedly spoken of her desire to drive down taxes, cut back public spending and strip away regulations on everything from housing, to education, to the workplace. In Truss’s mind, it would be a “complete contradiction of the Brexit vote” if it isn’t used to impose “fiscal discipline and economic liberalisation … [to] give people power over their own money and their own lives”.

Through the post-Brexit trade deals she now hopes to sign, she has been handed the perfect vehicle to inflict some of these policies on a deeply divided Britain. The trade deal that most excites Truss’s brand of Conservative is, of course, one with the US.

Many Brexiteers have looked longingly across the Atlantic for decades, to an economy where business is free from the shackles of tax and regulation, which they see as a product of the European Union – an entity that competes with the Soviet Union for their disdain. Brexit gives them the opportunity to emulate that US model. And because modern trade deals are concerned less with tariffs, and more with how a country is allowed to regulate food standards, run public services and treat overseas investors, a trade deal with the US would be a powerful mechanism for transforming our economy.

Truss will see eye to eye with Donald Trump’s administration. We know this because Trump’s administration, unlike our own government, has told us exactly what it wants from a trade deal. It wants Britain to allow food produced in enormous animal factories, pumped with steroids, hormones and antibiotics, into our markets. It wants us to accept even greater monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical corporations, meaning higher prices for medicines and more strain on the NHS. It wants us to allow the Silicon Valley tech firms from Amazon to Facebook to Google to have greater power to use and abuse our data. And it wants to extend the rights of US corporations to enjoy “regulatory stability”, even giving them the right to sue the British government in secret “corporate courts” for daring to do things such as introduce a sugar tax or pass a law to stop fracking.

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Two weeks ago, documents were leaked from the US trade talks that neither we nor our MPs had been allowed to see. They show that the US is streets ahead of us in negotiating ability and fully prepared to use a trade deal to prise Britain away from the standards and protections we enjoy in the EU. Negotiators have been clear that we will not be able to introduce the sort of special tax on Silicon Valley corporations that Philip Hammond proposed, and which is being introduced in France, if we want a US trade deal.

This should alarm us, but will doubtless be music to the ears of Truss, who believes we are “a nation of Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters”. She has criticised any attempt to control the overwhelming power of these corporations. When people have raised concerns about Airbnb in the tourist industry, or on the cost of housing, her answer is simple: cut all regulations in those sectors. She’s called for sweeping cuts to regulations in the workplace, too, boasting about making it easier for employers to sack the idlers and make the country more efficient and productive.

The problem with the railways isn’t, for Truss, that they are run for profit, but that they haven’t been privatised enough. The problem with austerity isn’t that it’s gone too far, or that it wasn’t necessary, but that it was nowhere near radical enough. And anyone who disagrees must be part of that “blob of vested interests” seeking only their own protection to waste the country’s resources.

Given that trade deals now focus extensively on regulation, they will give Truss a mechanism to drive forward this deregulation agenda. They are particularly useful mechanisms for politicians like Truss because they are also highly complicated agreements with almost no transparency or accountability to parliament.

During his time at the department for international trade, Liam Fox, once an advocate of parliamentary sovereignty, refused to give MPs any right to amend or stop trade deals, or even to see the texts being negotiated. When parliament tried to give itself the power to stop trade deals earlier this year, Fox simply left his trade bill to die in the House of Lords. So Truss will be operating under royal prerogative. What’s more, as international treaties, these deals take precedence over domestic law and can be difficult and time-consuming to extricate yourself from.

Given the beliefs of Truss, as well as her new colleagues in cabinet, it’s impossible to imagine she would stand up to Trump’s negotiators even if Britain had the ability to do so. Rather, Truss will seek to collude with Trump to unleash a bonfire of regulations, and clear away any impediment to the big businesses agenda.

• Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now