Government ministers have gone in to bat for British jobs with one attacking Boeing's trade war against Bombardier as a “spurious, try-on complaint” while the business secretary travels to France to fight for jobs at car giant PSA.

Business Minister Richard Harrington told the Northern Ireland Affairs committee in Westminster that the US aerospace giant’s actions against Bombardier represented a “big, multinational business [exhibiting] market dominant behaviour” against a smaller rival.

Boeing has successfully campaigned to have the US impose 300pc tariffs on Bombardier's C-Series airliners, large parts of which are made in Belfast, where Bombardier is the biggest employer, with 4,000 staff. The duties have cast doubt on the future of the programme and jobs in Northern Ireland.

The US company maintains that Canada-based Bombardier has been able to sell the C-Series to American carrier Delta at below cost only because it received state aid from the UK and others.

Mr Harrington warned that Boeing - a major supplier of defence equipment to the UK including Apache helicopters and P-8 spy planes - had “significantly soured” its relationship with the UK Government by pursing the complaint.

“We cannot view Boeing in the same way we did before - Boeing is affecting the economy of the UK,” Mr Harrington said.

However he stopped short of saying that Boeing would be excluded from UK defence contracts because of its actions when asked by MPs how the UK would respond.

Industry experts have argued that the UK can hardly afford to exclude a major supplier such as Boeing from its contracts. The company itself has pointed out that it is a large employer in the UK, supporting 18,700 jobs directly or in its supply chain. It is building a new factory in Sheffield that is due to open later this year, building parts for its 737 and 777 planes.

Boeing argues that state support received by Bombardier from Canada and the UK is illegal. However, Mr Harrington said such practices were common in the aerospace industry and Boeing itself had received billions in similar backing from the US.

Boeing, Mr Harrington added, was using US president Donald Trump’s “America first” policy as “political cover for a commercial dispute”.

He said that the US company did not offer a competing product and had not suffered any harm from Delta agreeing to buy 75 C-Series jets, calling Boeing’s behaviour “unacceptable”.

The tariffs still need to be confirmed by the US International Trade Commission but Mr Harrington raised the prospect of the Bombardier issue becoming a precedent under President Trump’s protectionist policy, saying the complaint could prove to be a test case.

In a statement Boeing said it “values its relationship with the UK and is looking forward to continuing to grow this partnership”. The company added: “The trade case in the US  is entirely separate. Bombardier has been found – preliminarily – to have violated trade law by the appropriate authorities. The US process is not political, but legal and it is very simple.”

Mr Harrington's intervention came as Greg Clark, the Secretary of State for Business, travelled to Paris on a similar mission to meet with the boss of Vauxhall owner PSA Group, which this week announced further redundancies at its Ellesmere Port plant in Cheshire.

Mr Clark will meet PSA chief Carlos Tavares for discussions about the company's decision to axe 250 jobs this week, on top of 400 that are already going.

PSA wants to move the Ellesmere Port plant, which builds the Astra, to a single shift, and has said production of cars there is "significantly" more expensive than at other plants in the French group's European portfolio.

A source confirmed that Mr Clark was set to discuss the future of the Vauxhall business, which PSA bought along with sister marque Opel from GM for £1.9bn in August last year.

However, it is understood that the meeting had been in the Business Secretary's diary for several weeks and was not arranged as a consequence of this week's fresh job losses.