Brexit talks frozen
‘Difficult’ EU refuses to budge as UK says deal ‘won’t be easy’
THE EU has ‘frozen’ progress in the Brexit talks and is wasting time, the UK negotiating team claimed yesterday.
Brussels has imposed a ‘block’ on progressing towards a deal unless the UK accepts its position on state aid and fisheries.
Lead EU negotiator Michel Barnier said that a deal between the UK and EU was ‘unlikely’ before the end of the transition period in December. Their comments came after the latest round of talks – the seventh – ended in stalemate.
A senior UK negotiator said: ‘The process block now is the EU’s insistence that we must accept their position on state aid and fisheries before we can talk about anything else. Obviously we’re not going to do that. So it’s frozen. That doesn’t seem to us to be sensible.
‘We should be talking about the many other areas, some of which are productive, some of which are more difficult, but we are ready to talk about anything and it’s not us that’s slowing it down.’
Chief UK negotiator David Frost also accused the EU of making negotiations ‘unnecessarily difficult’.
‘The EU is still insisting not only that we must accept continuity with EU state aid and fisheries policy, but also that this must be agreed before any further substantive work can be done in any other area of the negotiation,’ he said in a statement. ‘This makes it unnecessarily difficult to make progress. Time is short for both sides.’
He said ‘little progress’ has been made, adding: ‘As I said last week, agreement is still possible, and it is still our goal, but it is clear that it will not be easy to achieve.’ In a separate press conference in Brussels, Mr Barnier said: ‘Today at this stage, an agreement between the UK and the European Union seems unlikely.
‘I simply do not understand why we are wasting valuable time.’
Mr Barnier added there had been ‘no progress whatsoever’ on the issue of fisheries. He said: ‘We hear the British Government’s concern about maintaining its sovereignty and its regulatory autonomy and we respect that, clearly.
‘But no international agreement was ever reached without the parties agreeing to common rules – no international agreement.
‘And I can predict, with absolute certainty, this will also be the case of trade agreements between the UK and other partners in the future such as the United States, Japan and Australia. Apart from the question of a level playing field there are still many other areas where progress is needed and for example, obviously fisheries where we have made no progress whatsoever on the issues that matter.’
He said the issue of a level playing field ‘is not going to go away, even if the UK continues to exist on a low-quality agreement on goods and services only’.
He added that ‘it is a non-negotiable pre-condition to grant access to our market of 450million citizens’.
‘It’s not us that’s slowing it down’