PM rejects Eurocrats’ call for Brexit rethink
Senior Brussels officials tell UK: Our hearts are still open to you
THERESA May dismissed a plea from Brussels last night to rethink the decision to leave the EU.
The European Union’s top two officials appealed to Britain to have a ‘change of heart’ about Brexit.
European Council president Donald Tusk told Britain that: ‘Our hearts are still open to you.’
He was backed by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who said: ‘Our door still remains open and I hope that will be heard clearly in London.’
His deputy, Frans Timmermans, said the bloc was ready for any British ‘second thoughts’.
The appeal follows debate in the UK about the possibility of a second referen- dum, and will be seen as an attempt to destabilise Mrs May before talks on a post-Brexit trade deal.
Last night, the PM used talks with Austrian president Sebastian Kurz to send a message to Brussels that she had no intention of reopening the question of Britain’s EU membership.
No 10 said that Mrs May told Mr Kurz, who is due to hold the rotating presidency of the EU, that ‘the Government will respect the decision taken by the British public to leave the EU’.
Downing Street also rejected suggestions that the free movement of people could stay until a possible transition period ends in 2021.
Leaked EU documents suggest Brussels will demand the concession as the price for agreeing to a transition deal.
But the PM’s official spokesman pointed out the EU had already agreed to a ‘cut-off date’ of March 2019.
The EU’s tactics will be seen as a sign that it supports the campaign by former party leaders Tony Blair and Nick Clegg to overturn Brexit.
Mr Tusk said: ‘If the UK Government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality, with all its negative consequences, in March next year – unless there is a change of heart among our British friends.’
But former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said that when the EU tries to tell the UK what to do, Britons go the other way, adding: ‘They are used to bullying countries into second referendums – but they are not going to bully us.’ Richard Tice, of the Leave Means Leave group, said: ‘Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker need to accept that Britain is a democracy – something the EU knows little about.’
THERE is no point in Britain continuing to follow EU rules after Brexit, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will warn today.
He is expected to tell a meeting of Mrs May’s Brexit ‘war cabinet’ it would be a mistake to sign up to a Norway-style model that would leave Britain shackled to the European Union.
One of his allies said: ‘He thinks we need to be free to diverge from EU rules where we see fit. We have to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. Otherwise people will ask, what is the point?’
‘They are used to bullying countries’
YOU will go on voting until you give us the result we want. such was yesterday’s message from the leaders of the EU bloc, as they urged the British public to change their minds about Brexit.
They didn’t put it quite so bluntly, of course. Instead, european council president Donald Tusk cooed disingenuously: ‘our hearts are still open for you,’ while commission president Jean-claude Juncker said the ‘door’ remained open.
But ‘hearts’ or ‘door’, their meaning was the same. Desperately worried about how they will make ends meet without UK taxpayers to pick up their bills, both are pressing for a second referendum in which they hope voters will reverse the historic decision of June 2016.
It’s a tactic the anti-democratic EU has deployed repeatedly in the past, refusing to take No for an answer (an old favourite from the Nicola sturgeon playbook) when voters in Denmark, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Greece turned against Brussels at the ballot box.
But if they believe the UK will meekly knuckle under, like all the rest, they seriously underestimate the British. For except among the most ardent of europhiles, there is no public appetite whatever for a second vote.
on the contrary, the prevailing mood is that we should get on with striking an exit deal, while planning for a future in charge of our own money, laws, borders and trading arrangements with the wider world.
This is the message the Government should be ramming home to the EU. so how depressing that confusion hangs over the cabinet’s aims, with some ministers seemingly agitating for the softest of soft Brexits – membership in all but name – while only a handful demand the full independence the country voted for.
While the uncertainty lasts, is it any wonder Brussels harbours false hopes that Brexit may never happen?
To her credit, Theresa May has insisted the decision to pull out of the EU – along with its single market and customs union – is irreversible. she and her ministers must keep spelling that out, with one voice, until the message gets through to the likes of Messrs Juncker and Tusk.
only then will they get serious about negotiating a deal to suit everyone.