Brexit ‘won’t split families’

HER OFFER ON CITIZENS’ RIGHTS ‘VERY FAIR’ For bank and medicine move, EU leaders use voting system similar to

BEurovision.

ritish Prime Minister Theresa May said yesterday the offer she had made on the rights of European Union (EU) citizens to live in Britain after Brexit was very fair and very serious and that her government would set out more detailed proposals on Monday.

EU leaders greeted the offer made during a summit in Brussels on Thursday with a degree of scepticism and said many questions remained.

“I want to reassure all those EU citizens who are in the UK, who have made their lives and homes in the UK, that no one will have to leave,” May told reporters before a second day of the EU summit yesterday. “We won’t be seeing families split apart,” she said, adding she also wanted similar guarantees for British people living elsewhere in the EU.

Details of the arrangement would be part of the negotiation process, she added.

EU leaders will decide soon where to move EU banking and medicines agencies that they are pulling out of London due to Brexit, using a voting system some liken to the Eurovision song contest.

Most of the remaining 27 EU states have expressed interest in hosting the European Banking Authority and the European Medicines Agency, which together employ more than 1 000 people.

They are keen not to let the historically divisive issue of hosting agencies break their unity over Brexit, although several officials joked about how the choice will be made after leaders agreed at a summit on Thursday it was the best way to stop rows.

“It is going to be an exciting race. We know how this works from Eurovision,” Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern joked, recalling his country’s 2014 win in the music festival by a bearded drag queen from Vienna. –

London

– Britain‘s opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has overtaken Theresa May for the first time as voters’ choice for who would make the best prime minister, a YouGov poll for The Times newspaper showed. After May’s botched gamble on a June 8 snap election deprived her Conservative Party of a majority, she is trying to strike a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government. The poll showed 35% of voters would prefer Corbyn, while 34% favoured May, with 30% unsure. -