United Kingdom: Down to the wire on EU trade deal
The clock is ticking down on the U.K. and European Union’s attempts to finalize a post-Brexit trade deal, said Cécile Ducourtieux and Virginie Malingre in Le Monde (France). European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreed this week to blow past “yet another selfimposed deadline” and keep negotiating. This time, no new deadline has been set. But we all know that “the only date that matters” is Dec. 31. Britain formally left the EU in January, but is in a transition period—under which its economic, trade, and security ties with the bloc remain unchanged—until New Year’s Eve. If no deal is reached by then, trade between the U.K. and EU will default to World Trade Organization terms. That will mean high tariffs on imports, long lines of trucks at border checkpoints, and economic pain for both sides. For months, talks between London and Brussels “have stumbled, again and again, on the same three issues” of fishing rights, conditions of competition, and dispute settlement. Both sides have postured ridiculously: Johnson warned that the Royal Navy might board French fishing boats that stray into U.K. waters as of Jan. 1, and the EU that British planes might be barred from flying over the Continent. Still, von der Leyen says, a “narrow path” to a trade deal remains.
We’ll get a deal because it is in Johnson’s self-interest, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian (U.K.). The prime minister is good at just one thing: identifying “What’s best for me?” He always looks to the Rupert Murdoch–owned Sunday Times for his marching orders, and this week the paper did all it could to “frighten the living daylights out of its readers, provoke a stampede of panic buying, and terrify Brexit MPs into a deal.” It shrieked that not reaching a deal would cause shortages of food and medicine and that Johnson alone would be to blame. We can be confident, then, that he will deliver a trade deal. It may be “a lousy, rotten, fleabitten thing,” but it will be “infinitely better than nothing.”
Not necessarily, said Ambrose EvansPritchard in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Forecasts suggest that the U.K.’s gross domestic product will fall by 4 percent even if we strike a trade deal with the EU; in a no-deal scenario, it would drop another 2 percent. That extra loss is unpleasant, but it is “not an economic catastrophe,” while the deal the EU is offering just might be. In pursuing a “level playing field,” the EU insists that it must be allowed to impose “lightning sanctions” anytime the U.K. “passes a new law or fails to replicate a fresh EU law.” Such a punitive clause would keep Britain tied to EU law, exactly the scenario Brexit was meant to avoid. It is Johnson’s deceitfulness that pushed the EU to make that demand, said Sean O’Grady in Independent.co.uk. He “has demonstrated time and again he cannot be trusted,” so the EU feels forced to bind the U.K. in writing. That will leave us with “all the disadvantages of rule by the EU Commission, but none of the advantages of automatic frictionless access” that we enjoyed when Britain was a member of the bloc. “No deal may be better than a bad deal after all.”