Lawmakers adopt a Brexit resolution
Text sets red lines
STRASBOURG, April 5, (RTRS): European Union lawmakers adopted a resolution on Wednesday setting their red lines for the two-year divorce talks with Britain and rejected attempts by British MEPs to recognise Gibraltar’s pro-EU stance in the Brexit referendum.
In a display of EU unity, the legislature’ text repeated the same priorities set by the EU summits’ chair Donald Tusk in his draft negotiating guidelines released last week.
The European Parliament wants talks on Britain’s future relations with the EU to start only after “substantial progress” is made on the bill for Brexit bill, on the Irish border, and on the rights of the 3 million EU citizens in Britain and the one million British residents in EU countries.
The text was backed by more than two-thirds of the deputies in the parliament, which will have to approve any deal with the United Kingdom.
Britain’s Under Secretary for Brexit Robin Walker said this was “a positive move” although Britain would prefer to start trade talks as soon as possible. He told reporters at the session in Strasbourg that Britain will also put citizens’ rights first in the Brexit process.
In a minor departure from Tusk’s text, the parliament’s resolution hinted at the possibility for Britain to reverse the Brexit process, stressing however that this would be possible only with the approval of all the remaining 27 member states.
“The door is open if Britain changes its mind,” Gianni Pittella, head of the centre-left grouping, the second largest in the parliament, told reporters. The Greens expressed a similar wish.
Negotiator
The move was aimed at strengthening the hand of the 48 percent of Britons who voted against Brexit in last year’s referendum, but was opposed by the EU chief negotiator on Brexit, Michel Barnier, parliament officials said.
The conservative grouping, the largest in the legislature, tried to distance itself from such a statement, although they backed the resolution. “Leave means leave,” the conservatives’ leader Manfred Weber said.
The resolution also allowed transitional arrangements to smooth the UK’s departure, but they should not last more than three years. MEPs also insisted that at the end of the process Britain cannot expect better conditions than when it was an EU member.
Lawmakers rejected two nearly identical amendments that would have added to the text a reference to Gibraltar’s pro-EU vote in last year’s Brexit referendum, a move meant to recall its residents back the EU but also prefer to remain in Britain.
The rocky British enclave on the southern Spain coast caused a harsh controversy after Tusk’s guidelines gave Madrid a say in the future relationship between Gibraltar and the EU after Britain leaves the bloc.
Gibraltar rejected the idea of Britain sharing sovereignty with Spain by 99 percent to 1 percent in a 2002 referendum, but voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU in last June’s Brexit vote.
In related news, Britain must stop pressing for immediate parallel talks with the European Union on a post-Brexit free trade deal, Barnier said on Wednesday, and first agree on withdrawal terms.
Barnier said May’s letter a week ago to trigger the two-year exit process was clearly a call for two parallel negotiations, one on how Britain quits the bloc and another on its future trade relationship with the EU.
“This is a very risky approach,” he said in a speech to the European Parliament. “To succeed, we need on the contrary to devote the first phase of negotiations exclusively to reaching an agreement on the principles of the exit.”
Certainty
Those must include providing legal certainty for people and businesses affected by Britain’s departure in March 2019, he said. There must also be a border arrangement that assures the fragile peace in Northern Ireland is not upset.
Only after progress on those issues would negotiators start “scoping” a future pact on trade, security and defence, he said.
Meanwhile, May has not ruled out allowing the free movement of people between Britain and the European Union during “an implementation phase” after Britain leaves the bloc, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
May, who triggered the formal divorce procedure with the European Union last week, has said she expects some kind of implementation phase, or transitional agreement, after two years of talks with the bloc.
She has offered few details on how an implementation phase would operate, but if Britain wants to keep the status quo before finalising a deal, it will have to accept the EU’s rules - the so-called four freedoms allowing the free movement of people, capital, goods and services.
Asked whether her government would rule out the free movement of people in any transitional period after the terms of Britain’s departure from the European Union were agreed, May declined to do so, the BBC said.
“Once we’ve agreed what the new relationship will be for the future, it will be necessary for there to be a period of time when businesses and governments are adjusting systems and so forth,” May told reporters on a visit to Saudi Arabia.
Concern over immigration from the European Union was a major reason behind Britain’s vote to leave and May has said she will respect those fears by not seeking membership of Europe’s single market which would mean allowing freedom of movement of people.
She added that Britain would have “control of our borders and control of our immigration”, the BBC reported.
Citing the same conversation with reporters, the Financial Times said May had suggested that Britain would not be able to complete a new trade deal with the EU until after Brexit happens in 2019, saying that there was a “legal situation in terms of how the European Union can conduct trade negotiations”.
However May said that by the time Britain leaves the EU, “it’s right that everybody should know what the future arrangements, the future relationship, that future partnership between us and the EU will be”.