Gove warns crisis should serve to ‘concentrate minds’ within EU

BRUSSELS should agree a quick trade deal with Britain, Michael Gove said yesterday, as No 10 told EU leaders to move to break the Brexit deadlock.

Britain rebuffed EU calls to request an extension to the Brexit transition period to buy more time to negotiate a deal and prevent the two sides being forced to trade on WTO terms alone after Dec 31.

“I think the Covid crisis, in some respects, should concentrate the minds of EU negotiators, reinforcing the vital importance of coming to a conclusion,” Mr Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, told MPS.

“Deadlines concentrate minds,” he said, adding that the history of Brexit proved that “whenever a deadline was extended the light at the end of the tunnel was replaced with more tunnel”.

Mr Gove, who is overseeing Britain’s negotiations, told the all-party Future

Relationship with the EU select committee that it was still possible, despite the virus, to finalise a trade deal by the end of this year, which is when the Brexit transition period ends. Britain will not ask for an extension, he said.

The economic impact of the coronavirus lockdown would make countries among the EU 27 more eager to strike trade deals with Britain, he added, which would not be possible during the transition period.

Michel Barnier, the EU’S chief negotiator, last week accused Britain of wasting time in the trade talks, which are currently being held online due to the coronavirus pandemic. He said there was no progress in areas such as fisheries, the level playing field guarantees on tax, labour rights, state aid and the environment as well as on the role of the European Court of Justice.

Amid frustrations at the limits of the European Commission’s negotiating mandate, No 10 called on the EU’S national leaders to intervene.

EU sources in Brussels said it was far too early to involve the bloc’s heads of state and government, who were, in any case, consumed by dealing with the pandemic.

The EU wants to preserve the existing state of access to UK fishing waters under any new free trade agreement. Britain, however, insists that any fishing agreement must be separate from the trade deal and access should be negotiated annually.

Were it not for the pandemic, the main topic of political conversation would be Brexit. The UK left the EU on January 31, prompting relief in the country that the deed was done. The three-and-a-half year political crisis triggered by the 2016 referendum seemed to be over. Boris Johnson was re-elected with a large majority to see it done and duly delivered, but it was not over by any means. The small matter of negotiating a trade agreement with our erstwhile partners began just as disaster struck.

But the talks, while described by some participants as surreal, have not ended. A timetable still has to be followed and despite a rearguard action by Remainers to delay the transition period beyond the end of the year the Government has declined. It may yet do so depending on the progress of the pandemic but for now the negotiations continue.

Yet as Michael Gove told MPS yesterday, the EU is finding it hard to come to terms with the reality that the UK is now a third country, certainly when it comes to fishing. The Cabinet Office minister said the bloc “did not accept its own logic” by recognising access to UK waters must be negotiated on an annual basis as with other non-eu nations. Given the preoccupation of European leaders with the impact of the pandemic in their own countries, there will be little appetite to adopt a less rigid position which Mr Gove said was “particularly difficult and challenging”.

Realistically, these talks need to be concluded by October, which would be difficult enough ordinarily but is now exceptionally hard to achieve. It would help if the EU appreciated that the UK is now an independent sovereign nation.