Brexit: Now divorce talks get really nasty

Davis to refuse discussions on £74bn bill until EU justifies it

DAVID Davis will provoke a huge row with Brussels next week by calling a halt to negotiations on the Brexit divorce bill unless the EU provides a legal basis for its hefty demands.

The European Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has warned that Britain must be ready to set out what it is willing to pay when the next round of talks begin on Monday in Brussels.

But Brexit Secretary Mr Davis will snub his request and refuse further discussions on the demand, thought to be for around £74billion, until the EU shows the legal justification for it.

As tensions between the two sides escalated yesterday, Brussels accused Britain of ‘magical thinking’ over Brexit and suggested ministers were willing to use the Northern Ireland peace process as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

The EU has warned that Brexit talks will be paralysed unless Britain puts forward details of out how it thinks the divorce bill should be worked out.

Mr Barnier is under orders from the 27 remaining EU countries that discussions on a future trade deal with Britain cannot begin until ‘sufficient progress’ is made on the bill, the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and Northern Ireland.

However, British officials believe Brussels will be forced into a climbdown as they think EU leaders will face a backlash from European businesses if they attempt to stall trade talks. A Whitehall source said: ‘It’s not just British businesses that want certainty. Firms in Germany, France and across Europe will be lobbying their governments to get on with working towards a trade deal.’

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who said recently that Brussels should ‘go whistle’ over the divorce bill, told Radio 4’s Today programme that Britain will meet its legal obligations to the bloc but will pay ‘not a penny more, not a penny less’ than it has to.

One EU official said there was a risk that Brexit talks could completely break down if progress is not made on agreeing the bill sooner rather than later. The official said: ‘ During the last round we made no progress. The UK recognised they have financial obligations but did not engage in identification of what these will be.’

Brussels also issued a series of inflammatory accusations against Theresa May. Senior EU officials ridiculed the Prime Minister’s negotiating strategy as ‘ magical thinking’ and accused UK officials of displaying a ‘lack of substance’.

EU sources accused Mrs May of jeopardising peace in Northern Ireland by using its border as a ‘bargaining chip’. One demanded that the UK ‘accepts responsibility for the consequences its decision to leave will have on the island of Ireland’.

The official criticised a position paper published by Whitehall last week on the future of Northern Ireland in which it linked the issue with wider talks about trade.

‘What we see in the UK paper is a lot of magical thinking about how the border could work,’ the official said. ‘We are concerned by the linkages created in the UK paper on Ireland between preservation of the peace process, the invisible border and the future relationship… the peace process must not become a bargaining chip in the negotiations.’

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson yesterday let slip that divisions remain within the Cabinet over how long a transition period – where Britain remains temporarily inside the EU customs union – should last following Brexit.

He said: ‘There’s a discussion about how long that will go – one, two, three years. My view is that we should get on.’

THIS week, the Mail noted with regret that every show of flexibility in the Brexit talks appears to have come from the British side. Now, at long last, this may be about to change.

In a welcome sign that our negotiators’ patience is running out, Brexit Secretary David Davis is to lay down an ultimatum to Brussels. He won’t discuss the Eurocrats’ demands for a divorce bill until they spell out their legal grounds for claiming it.

True, this may mean a period of deadlock. But with the European Union hinting at a preposterous £74billion bill, Mr Davis’s stand is eminently reasonable.

If chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier thinks he has a case, he has an obvious duty to tell us exactly what it is and give us the chance to challenge it.

But even if he can justify his claim – and that’s a mighty big ‘if’ – it will make little sense to talk hard figures until the details of our post-Brexit relationship are agreed.

Doesn’t his insistence on putting the cart before the horse, demanding cash before we know what we’re buying into, look like a cynical attempt to make Brexit as tough as possible so as to dissuade others from leaving the club?

If so, his conduct betrays not just 60million Britons but the 450million other EU citizens he claims to represent. For with our partners selling more to us than we sell to them, it’s in the interest of every one of them that we reach an amicable deal.

Britain has bent over backwards to be reasonable. Now it’s over to Brussels. If these talks collapse, through the Eurocrats’ obsession with cash to finance their bureaucracy, so be it. All of Europe will know precisely who to blame.