When Obama said that if the UK approved a Brexit it would move to the back of the queue for negotiation trade deals, he was lying:

The US is hoping that a quick trade and investment deal with the UK after it leaves the EU could kickstart the stalled negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which has met increasing resistance on the continent.

As well as serving the US’s purposes, such an agreement would be welcomed by the UK government as proof that it can recreate the necessary web of trade links post-Brexit.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has just spent two days in the UK talking with the prime minister’s officials and with the new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, exploring what form such a UK-US trade deal might take.

As The Guardian explains: “The UK cannot formally sign any trade deals with other countries or trading blocs until it has left the EU, but it appears to be accepted that negotiations on the outline shape of such deals can start before that happens.”

As an aside, it appears that chief among US goals is to make current and future steps toward privatization of the British NHS irreversible:

One of the issues raised by those advocating leaving the EU was that remaining a member state would see the UK obliged to sign up to a TTIP deal that included ISDS. The fear was that ISDS would make re-nationalising privatised NHS services prohibitively expensive if US companies were involved. In theory, the latter might try to use the ISDS provisions in TTIP to claim that their future profits had been “expropriated” by nationalisation, and to demand compensation.

However, the UK could now sign up to a US investment treaty with significantly fewer protections than those offered by TTIP’s ICS system, which is what the EU is still pushing for. Instead of Brexit helping to protect the NHS, it may end up bringing in a system that protects it less than if the UK had stayed in the EU.

This would be a very bad thing.