Brexit rows redux

Brexit rows redux

By Jim Brunsden

April 27, 2020

Michel Barnier returned to action last week after recovering from his brush with Covid-19, but the negotiations he is leading with the UK are in much less good health.

The EU’s chief negotiator said that he had been left “disappointed” and “worried” after a week of virtual talks between his 100-strong team and their British counterparts. The discussions were the first formal negotiations since coronavirus forced the cancellation of face-to-face talks last month. Barnier spent much of the past few weeks in self-isolation after contracting the illness.

In unusually direct language for an international negotiation, Mr Barnier accused the UK on Friday of refusing “to engage seriously” on some topics, and of seeking to “slow down discussions”. He warned that the talks may be in trouble by June unless Britain changes course. What Brussels criticises as a lack of urgency, the UK insists is a reflection of its determination to fight for the national interest. UK officials argue that Britain has done what Brussels has so often asked it to do during the Brexit process: it has explained what it wants.

The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier returned to the negotiating table last week  after a bout with Covid

The problem is that what Britain wants bears scant resemblance to the EU’s notions. At his press conference on Friday, Barnier brandished a copy of the political declaration on future relations that Boris Johnson agreed with EU leaders last year. That document is barely six months old, but it already seems like a relic from the distant past, and that’s not just because of the transformations wrought by the pandemic.

The UK already made clear earlier this year that its vision of future co-operation with the EU is quite different to the kind of overarching, institutionalised relationship that the political declaration sets out. Instead, Britain wants to negotiate a standalone trade deal, with some separate treaties covering issues such as air transport and co-operation on nuclear energy.

Barnier argued on Friday that the EU’s negotiating stance — which includes demands for Britain to grant access to its fishing waters and for the UK to sign up to a binding “level playing field” of competition, labour market and environmental rules — is simply an attempt to put the political declaration into practice.

This is only partly true: the declaration, for example, does not explicitly say that Britain should stay within the EU’s system of state-aid rules; the EU’s negotiating mandate for the talks does. The UK counterargument is that its position is founded on something equally legitimate: precedent. Britain claims that it wants a trade deal like Canada’s and will accept the kind of fisheries agreement that the EU has with Norway — one that leaves access to waters up to annual negotiation.

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UK chief negotiator David Frost took to Twitter on Friday to claim that “there is no need” for a trade deal to contain novel and unprecedented ‘level playing field’ rules, for example tying us to EU laws, or a role for the EU Court”. But the UK’s appeal to precedent has holes as well: Britain wants more extensive market access (including tariff-free — quota-free trade in goods) than any existing EU trade deal grants to an advanced economy.

What last week’s discussions served to underline is that the UK and the EU are seeking to negotiate fundamentally different projects.

Nowhere in Britain’s vision is there anything like the kind of governance arrangements that the EU has in mind: an arbitration system covering different aspects of the future partnership, complete with a role for the European Court of Justice when there are questions over how to interpret EU law. Britain does not want the future relationship to refer to EU law.

So where do we go from here? We should not expect much progress from the upcoming rounds of talks. Some top-level political intervention will probably be needed sooner rather than later, especially given Britain’s continued insistence that it will not seek an extension to its post-Brexit transition period, which expires at the end of this year.An EU-UK stocktaking summit is scheduled for June. No one yet knows exactly when, or under what conditions, it will take place. But it is looking ever more important.

jim.brunsden@ft.com; @jimbrunsden