UK, EU envoys hold surprise Brexit meeting
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Britain’s Brexit minister scrambled to hold talks yesterday ahead of a crunch summit this week as time runs out on striking a divorce deal.
Barnier and Dominic Raab held surprise talks in Brussels, as London insisted that the negotiations were far from reaching a conclusion.
With Britain set to leave the bloc at the end of March, European Commission head JeanClaude Juncker is demanding “substantial progress” this week, specifically on the vexed issue of the UK’s border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.
With a breakthrough still seemingly elusive, Raab went to Brussels for talks with Barnier to get a head start on Wednesday’s summit.
“With several big issues still to resolve, including the Northern Ireland backstop, it was jointly agreed that face-to-face talks were necessary ahead of this week’s October European Council,” said a spokeswoman for Raab’s ministry.
A senior British government source played down reports that a deal had already been done.
“It’s very much in the EU’s interests to make it look like there is a deal,” the source said, because it would then leave Britain looking “like we are the ones being intransigent”.
There are still some “big issues” to be resolved and “Dominic has gone out there to try to resolve the outstanding issues”.
In Brussels, diplomatic sources told AFP that member states’ ambassadors to the EU had been called for an urgent meeting at 6:30pm (1630 GMT).
“They are going to take stock,” one source said, but currently the British “do not seem ready yet” to sign off on an agreement.
Yesterday’s flurry of activity comes as British Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to face what one newspaper cartoon dubbed “hell week”.
Tomorrow she will discuss the Irish border issue with her cabinet, amid speculation that further ministers could resign if the prime minister ploughs on with her proposals.
She then goes to Brussels, where the border between the UK’s Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic remains a sticking point in the Brexit talks.
Neither London, Dublin nor Brussels wants to see checks imposed on the border – but the problem persists of finding a way to square that aim with May’s desire to leave the European single market and the customs union.
Britain has proposed sticking with EU customs rules after Brexit as a fallback option to keep the border open, until a wider trade deal is agreed that avoids the need for frontier checks.
May says that this will only be temporary, but her spokeswoman was forced to clarify the point after media reports that the final “backstop” arrangement will have no legal ending date.
The EU’s suggestion would see Northern Ireland remain aligned with Brussels’ rules, thus varying from the rest of the UK.
The proffered plans have infuriated the pro-Brexit hard core of May’s centre-right Conservative Party – not to mention her Northern Irish allies in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
The minority Conservative government relies on the DUP, Northern Ireland’s biggest party, for a thin majority in parliament,
The DUP are staunchly proUK, pro-Brexit, and fiercely opposed to any moves that could put distance between Northern Ireland and the British mainland.
They have threatened to vote down the British government’s budget if May gives way to Brussels.
Conservative Party vicechairman James Cleverly told Sky News television: “We are not going to stay indefinitely in a customs union ... we are not going to see Northern Ireland carved off.”
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC television that any customs backstop would be “time limited”, but did not say whether an expiry date would be written into the deal.
Raab’s predecessor, David Davis, who resigned in July to oppose May’s “Chequers” plan for Brexit, led the way with a call for her cabinet to reject the plan.
“The government’s strategy has three fundamental flaws, all of which are surfacing as we approach the endgame,” Davis wrote in the Sunday Times, ahead of an expected cabinet meeting tomorrow.
He said May made “an unwise decision in December to accept the EU’s language on dealing with the Northern Ireland border”.
Influential Conservative lawmaker Steve Baker, deputy chair of the party’s European Research Group of some 60 lawmakers, tweeted that Davis had written a “great article”.
Conservative eurosceptic lawmaker Nadine Dorries agreed that Davis’s intervention was “significant”.
“His position has always been, change the policy, not the PM,”
Dorries tweeted. “Getting May out and him becoming an interim leader may be the only way to deliver Brexit and FTA [a free-trade agreement].”
The Sunday Times said up to 44 lawmakers had sent letters demanding a confidence vote in May to the Conservatives’ influential 1922 Committee, which must trigger a leadership contest if at least 48 lawmakers request one.
Another Conservative lawmaker, Priti Patel, wrote in the popular tabloid the Sun, asking May: “What part of ‘We voted to leave the customs union’ don’t you get, prime minister?”
“Now is the time for the government to honour the referendum mandate and the Conservative manifesto by seeking a free-trade deal with the EU that enables Britain to become an economic powerhouse in the decades to come,” Patel said.
Eurosceptic Anne-Marie Trevelyan wrote a similar article for yesterday’s Telegraph, arguing that May’s plan would leave Britain “in a permanent temporary customs union” over which London has “no control of the escape mechanism”.
The Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday newspaper, quoted leaked government e-mails as saying that DUP leader Arlene Foster, who held talks with EU officials last week, was “ready for a no-deal scenario, which she now believed was the likeliest one”.
British officials said Foster had called her meeting with Barnier “hostile and difficult”, the newspaper reported.
Some diplomats in Brussels have suggested the leaders could talk through the night on Wednesday and approve the outlines of an agreement while they are still in the Belgian capital for broader talks on Thursday.