What the commentators said
The biggest rows in divorce cases are almost always about money, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. And that looks set to be the case with the Brexit negotiations, too. At the insistence of the EU Commission, Barnier is demanding that Britain commits to a massive exit payment – a figure of s100bn has now been mooted – before we can even begin to discuss our future trading arrangements with the EU. Yet Davis and his team are understandably reluctant to commit to any such payment before they know the rough shape of a future trade deal. Brussels is pushing its luck by demanding quite such a large exit payment from the UK, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. It should bear in mind that if these negotiations end in no deal in March 2019, it will have a legal claim to little, if any, money from Britain, which is currently the second largest net contributor to the EU budget after Germany.
The Spectator talks bullishly of drawing up plans for a no-deal Brexit, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman, but I’m “honestly baffled” as to what that would entail. How exactly do you prepare for British airlines losing the right to fly to Europe, or for chaos at customs, or for “the immediate emergence of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, or for the inability to transport isotopes for cancer treatments over borders”, or for food vanishing from shelves? You might as well “make a plan” for surviving a fall off a 20-storey building. Britain would be mad to gamble on a no-deal outcome in the belief that “the EU would blink first”, agreed Philippe Legrain on Capx. “This is the miscalculation that the Greek government made in 2015: remember how that turned out?” There’s more at stake here for Brussels than just the money it stands to receive from the UK. How it handles Brexit will also shape how others think it might act in future showdowns with, say, an “anti-euro Italian government or a putative President Marine Le Pen. So even if the UK Mini bloody-mindedly refuses to swerve at the last minute, the EU juggernaut is willing to bear the collision damage.”
What next?
Britain will introduce curbs on EU migrants after Brexit to deter all but the highestskilled workers, according to draft Home Office plans leaked this week. The document, which hasn’t been signed off by ministers, says lower-skilled EU workers should be offered residency for a maximum of two years, while higher-skilled ones should receive work permits for a longer period of three to five years.
British firms will be required to complete an “economic needs” test before hiring abroad as part of efforts to encourage them to “meet their needs from resident labour”.