What the commentators said
The British are famed for their pragmatism, while EU leaders are supposedly masters of compromise, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. So why, after “five rounds of jaw-jaw in Brussels”, has the bargaining “still not advanced beyond square one”? There is fault on both sides. EU leaders make the understandable point that it is hard to negotiate with a British government that is still negotiating with itself ( see page 6). UK ministers, meanwhile, argue with some justification that the EU is being unreasonably rigid about the sequencing of talks. That much is undeniable, said Christopher Meyer in The Independent. It’s “daft” to insist that Ireland’s border arrangements must be settled before the shape of the UK-EU trade deal is discussed, because the former clearly depends on the latter.
It’s in both sides’ interests to reach a trade deal, said Philip Aldrick in The Times. But the EU is in less of a hurry to get there. The UK needs a transition deal in place by February to prevent businesses triggering contingency plans and moving to Europe, so “the longer Brussels holds out, the more business it can poach”. Britain is hoping to get round that problem by linking the generosity of its offer to the date a transition is agreed. It’s a sensible strategy. After all, if companies shifted enough businesses abroad to cost the UK one percentage point of GDP, that would wipe “£20bn off the economy and £8bn off tax revenues”.
“Only the most swivel-eyed Ukipper” would pretend that leaving the EU without any sort of deal wouldn’t have costs attached to it, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. But the reality is that these costs diminish as we get closer to the March 2019 deadline, because we’ll already have had no choice but to start spending cash on contingency plans. In six months’ time, if no deal is in prospect, it “won’t make much difference either way”. The Government will already have outlayed money to expand our customs facilities; banks will already have moved some operations to Paris and Frankfurt. “At that point, we might as well walk away, because there won’t be much point in paying for a deal that won’t be worth much anymore.”