Brexit talks: “going backwards”?
In this time of tumultuous change, you can always rely on one constant, said Tom Peck in The Independent: the lack of any progress in Brexit talks. After yet another round of negotiations stalled last week, neither side even bothered to put an optimistic spin on events. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, said that the talks had at times felt like they were “going backwards more than forwards”, adding that he now thought a deal “unlikely”. His
British counterpart, David Frost, accused the EU side of holding things up by insisting the UK accept its positions on state aid and fisheries before it would discuss anything else.
The prospects of a deal that can be ratified by the end of the year look slim at this point, said Reaction.life. The usual EU practice of “cobbling together an agreement in the final 72 hours” might work with political treaties, but not with a complex trade pact. If there is an “11th-hour fix”, it will be “a thin unfriendly deal”, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. And regardless of its content, it would be condemned by Nigel Farage and others as a sell-out. Boris
Johnson can’t win. He’ll either be accused of delivering “Brexit in name only” or he’ll have “no-deal chaos filling the TV news”. There will be massive disruption to trade whatever happens.
The Brexit deal won’t fail over fish, said Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. The real sticking point is competition policy. The EU wants the UK to continue to match its rules in this area because it fears that the UK might otherwise “start subsidising steel companies in Wales or carmakers in the Midlands, and then dump the lot on European markets”. The UK doesn’t want to sign up to this – and nor should it. This isn’t because we want to dump cheap steel on EU markets. It’s because, to reap any benefits from Brexit, we’ll almost certainly need to direct more subsidies to the high-tech industries that the UK is well placed to exploit in the future, such as pharmaceutical research and artificial intelligence. The EU’s backward-looking competition policy would hobble us in this regard. A trade agreement is “highly desirable – if only as a framework for future co-operation”. But we shouldn’t pursue one at any cost.