Brexit: the search for a deal continues

The scene is set for the endgame in the Brexit negotiations, said Reaction.life. We’ve reached the stage where people talk of “sherpas” going into “tunnels”, along with all the other abstruse terminology connected with the concluding episodes of lengthy EU negotiations. The UK staged a “walkout of sorts” from the talks after being rebuffed by European leaders at the recent EU summit, said Daniel Boffey in The Guardian, but the two sides resumed negotiations last week after Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, publicly acknowledged that UK flexibility in the talks would need to be reciprocated. Significant disagreements remain, but it seems we have at least got the “theatrics” out of the way. “The fate of the deal now lies squarely in the detail and the negotiating room.”

The last remaining obstacles to a deal are fishing rights and state aid, said The Economist – and neither of them should be insuperable. Given that the UK resorts to subsidies less than EU countries, it’s “mystifying” why a Tory government is fighting so hard for the right to shower lots of taxpayers’ money on companies and industries. As for fish, both sides need a deal. Without one, EU fishing vessels would lose access to richer British waters, and ours “would lose tariff-free access to the EU market, which buys 70% of their catch”. France must stop insisting that the EU’s “over-generous quotas” remain the same after Brexit, and the UK must “drop its new-found enthusiasm for subsidies and its bid to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol”. Let’s get this thing done.

Boris Johnson is not “scared of Brussels’ disapproval” and knows that you have to hold firm to extract concessions from it, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. But equally, he knows that a no-deal exit would “look like – and might actually be – a failure of statecraft”. It’s not just the queues at ports, which are bound to happen to some extent when we leave the customs union. “It is more the need to unite the country, help secure our own Union, calm global nerves, lift us out of the Covid gloom and set a new course on comfortable terms with our former partners.” The pressure to sign a deal, even an unsatisfactory one, is great. From the PM’s point of view, even a “sell-out” agreement would bring benefits compared to a no-deal exit, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. If nothing else, it would make his administration look “halfway competent”. Given Britain’s weak bargaining position, we’re bound to end up with a “flimsy” arrangement far inferior to our old bespoke terms of EU membership. “But it will be a ‘deal’, and one a weary, distracted, fearful British populace will be grateful for.”