EU ready to give more guarantees on Brexit

paris — The European Union is prepared to give Britain further Brexit guarantees to help a divorce deal through the British parliament, the bloc’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said in an interview published on Saturday.

“We can find guarantees to confirm, clarify, guarantee the goodwill and good faith of the Europeans with commitments which would have real legal force,” Barnier said in comments published in several European newspapers including Die Welt in Germany and Les Echos in France.

Barnier also suggested European leaders would be amenable to a short “technical” delay in Britain’s departure from the EU, scheduled for March 29, to give the British parliament time to formally ratify a final divorce deal.

The British parliament rejected the original Brexit deal hammered out by Prime Minister Theresa May and EU leaders. —

NEW DELHI — Britain’s Brexit champion Boris Johnson on Saturday hit out at mounting calls for a second referendum on European Union membership predicting it would arouse widespread “anger”.

The former foreign minister turned tormentor of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also mocked the “bastards” who run the EU as he attacked the bloc.

Questioned at a conference in New Delhi about pressure for a repeat of the 2016 referendum in Britain, Johnson said “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“I think that the anger in the population would be so intense and the tedium — people would be driven absolutely round the bend by the idea of having to vote on this thing again.” “It was a very acrimonious, very divisive campaign” in 2016, he said, predicting any second vote would produce the same result. Johnson quit as foreign minister in May’s right-wing government last year in protest at her proposed departure deal with the EU — which would keep Britain temporarily in the EU customs union as a “backstop” until problems with the Irish border are settled.

Parliament has since rejected the deal and May is battling political turmoil ahead of the scheduled March 29 departure date.

“We need to get this Brexit done properly and our prime minister now needs to punch a hole through that backstop and it has got to be a hole that is big enough to fit the entire UK,” Johnson told the India Today media group conference.

“Once she does that we are free. We are at the races. I am hoping she will do it,” he declared of the intense talks between the government and Brussels. —

People would be driven absolutely round the bend by the idea of having to vote on this thing again

Boris Johnson, Ex- British foreign secretary