EU door shut to UK for good: Hollande

Lower house to debate EU customs union membership

PARIS, April 19, (Agencies): The door to the European Union is now closed to Britain and Europeans should not accept any attempt to reverse Brexit, former French president Francois Hollande warned in an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph published on Thursday.

“It’s shut. The vote has taken place and nobody can question it,” he said, dismissing attempts by the Remain camp to do so. “One cannot open a negotiation thinking that there is any way out other than leaving,” he was quoted as saying.

“The worst thing would be for overly long discussions (on Brexit) to prevent the EU from moving forward and for doubt to set in about the irrevocable nature of Brexit.”

The former Socialist leader, who ruled France during the 2016 Brexit referendum and until May last year, has recently come out of self-imposed silence to promote his memoires and step up his criticism of his successor, Emmanuel Macron.

Although Hollande’s hardline view on Brexit echoes that expressed privately by French diplomats, Macron has been careful to keep the door open to Britain changing its mind on Brexit.

On Tuesday, the 40-year old leader told EU lawmakers that the best way for Britain to maintain a strong trade relationship with Europe would be to remain an EU member.

In the Telegraph, Hollande said Europe had been generous enough in its handling of David Cameron’s demand for a renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s EU membership, but that his mistake had been to call a vote at all.

“We all made efforts to give Prime Minister David Cameron the conditions to enable him to go the British people and convince them (to stay),” Hollande was quoted as saying.

“If I have one lesson to take away, it is that referendums are boomerangs,” he said.

Debate

Meanwhile, Britain’s lower house of parliament will debate staying in a customs union with the European Union next week, stepping up pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May to change her Brexit blueprint.

Opposition Labour and pro-EU Conservative lawmakers have backed having a so-called backbench debate next Thursday after the upper house dealt a blow to May by challenging her decision to rule out staying in the bloc’s customs union.

The debate, which if put to a vote will be largely symbolic and will not instruct the government to follow its conclusions, adds pressure on May, who has stuck to her argument that only by ending Britain’s membership of the union will London be able to strike new trade deals independently of the EU.

The debate, backed by Labour’s Yvette Cooper who chairs parliament’s home affairs committee, “calls on the government to include as an objective in negotiations on the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union the establishment of an effective customs union between the two territories”.

In related news, the European Union should stop waiting to see what the final Brexit deal is and “urgently” start planning for Britons who live on their territory now, a think-tank said on Thursday.

The rights of three million Europeans living in Britain has been a key issue in Brexit talks, but the situation facing around one million British expats in the other 27 countries is more uncertain, the Migration Policy Institute Europe said in a report.

The Brussels-based think-tank said the EU should streamline their systems for Britons who want to stay, and even allow them to register in friendly places like pubs to make the process less intimidating.

The lack of any final Brexit agreement has raised uncertainty but a roadmap for how EU countries should treat Britons living there was “urgently needed”, MPI Europe said.

“Many EU countries have yet to begin planning for issues likely to affect their UK nationals after Brexit, with officials interviewed in a number of member states reporting they are unsure of whose remit these Britons will fall under,” the report said.