International Brexit Discussions v11: U.K and Switzerland sign post-Brexit financial services deal
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Brexit Trade Deal Gets a Final OK From E.U. Parliament
The vote is the formal end of a Brexit process that began nearly five years ago.
By Steven Erlanger | April 28, 2021
The vote is the formal end of a Brexit process that began nearly five years ago.
By Steven Erlanger | April 28, 2021
BRUSSELS — The European Parliament has voted by a large margin to give the European Union’s final approval to a Brexit deal already beset by difficulties, complaints and a court challenge.
The tally, released Wednesday, was 660 in favor, with five against and 32 abstentions.
While the outcome was never really in doubt, the Parliament expressed considerable concerns about the trustworthiness of the current British government to carry out its side of the Brexit bargain, including the trade deal that was just approved.
That agreement, which governs trade and customs issues and provides for zero tariffs and zero quotas, has been applied conditionally since the beginning of the year. But a negative vote by the European Parliament would have killed it, producing the “no-deal Brexit” that neither side favored.
The deal leaves out key issues like financial services and foreign and security policy. Debates and consultations over how best to implement the trade deal and the general withdrawal agreement in real life seem fated to extend indefinitely.
The vote marks the end of a long, winding and often bitter road that many have compared to an angry divorce after nearly 45 years of marriage. Britons voted to leave the European Union after a campaign filled with exaggerations on both sides nearly five years ago, in June 2016.
Britain is now on its third prime minister since then. The struggle over how to define Brexit and Britain’s future relationship with the European Union destroyed the prime ministerships of David Cameron, who was sure that Britons would choose to remain, and of his successor, Theresa May, who failed to sell a Brexit that would keep Britain closer to Brussels.
Boris Johnson wanted a more defined break, giving Britain the power to set its own regulations and standards, which entailed pulling the country out of Europe’s single market. But that raised the thorny issue of the border between Northern Ireland, which is part of Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the European Union.
All agreed that to keep the peace on the island of Ireland, there could not be the restoration of a land border. To solve the problem, Mr. Johnson proposed a border in the Irish Sea, which came into force with the Withdrawal Agreement. It has since become the source of considerable problems and aggravations with new customs duties and health checks, and Brussels accuses Mr. Johnson of scheming to eliminate them.
It also raised cries of betrayal among members of the Democratic Unionist Party, which backed the Conservative government throughout Brexit. On Wednesday, in the face of a no-confidence vote, the party’s leader, Arlene Foster, paid the price for that policy, announcing her resignation, effective May 28.
The European Parliament had delayed its vote to protest Britain’s handling of Northern Ireland and the protocol. Britain’s actions are the source of a legal complaint filed by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, after Britain unilaterally extended grace periods for not conducting checks on goods being transported between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain.
That mistrust ran through the debate over the trade deal, called the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Christophe Hansen, a key legislator on Brexit from Luxembourg, said that a positive vote “should not be seen as a blank check to the U.K. government or a blind vote of confidence in that they will implement the agreements between us in good faith, but it is rather an insurance policy from our perspective.”
The agreement, Mr. Hansen said, “will help us remind the United Kingdom of the commitments it has signed up to.”
Manfred Weber, a German who heads the largest party grouping, the center-right European People’s Party, put it bluntly on Twitter. “We will vote in favor of the post-Brexit T.C.A.,” he wrote, referring to the trade agreement. “But we are concerned about its implementation, because we do not trust Boris Johnson’s government.”
There were also numerous worries expressed about Britain’s misusing or undermining the complicated arrangements on fishing rights.
David McAllister, a German legislator who is half Scottish, dismissed some of the problems as teething issues. But he said that some derived from “the kind of Brexit the U.K. has chosen for itself,” which will mean increasing divergence from the European Union single market. That by itself will require continuing discussion, he said, as well as working through areas left out of the Brexit deal, including financial services and foreign and security policies.
Brussels is committed to work on practical solutions between Northern Ireland, mainland Britain and Ireland, he said. “But the protocol is not the problem, it is the solution. The name of the problem is Brexit.”
Asking Parliament to ratify the deal, the Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, promised that Brussels would use the dispute and enforcement mechanisms in the deal to ensure compliance by Britain. If not, she said, she would not hesitate to impose punitive tariffs.
“The agreement comes with real teeth — with a binding dispute settlement mechanism and the possibility for unilateral remedial measures where necessary,” she said. “We do not want to have to use these tools. But we will not hesitate to use them if necessary.”
Unhappy with Britain, the Parliament had delayed ratification twice. But the conditional implementation would have run out at the end of April, so the Parliament finally cast its vote.
After a debate of nearly five hours on Tuesday, the legislators, many of whom were attending virtually, voted remotely, with the final totals revealed on Wednesday morning.
Michel Barnier, who was the E.U.’s chief negotiator with Britain, thanked the legislators for their diligence. He praised the deal but warned: “Everyone has to shoulder responsibility and respect what they have signed up to.”
He summarized the feelings of many when he said: “This is a divorce, a warning and a failure, a failure of the European Union, and we have to learn lessons from it.”
Responding to the vote, Mr. Johnson said in a statement that “this week is the final step in a long journey, providing stability to our new relationship with the E.U. as vital trading partners, close allies and sovereign equals.”
Ms. von der Leyen has said that ratification would mark a new chapter in relations with Britain, for good or bad. She hoped, she said, that it would represent “the foundation of a strong and close partnership based on our shared interests and values.”
The complications of Brexit, and the continuing struggles over its implementation, have served if nothing else to end talk in the rest of the European Union about making a similar exit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/world/europe/brexit-eu-parliament-approval.html
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‘Tory quarrels and betrayals’ determined UK’s post-Brexit future, says Barnier
Revealed: EU’s chief negotiator’s diaries, The Great Illusion, gives blow-by-blow account of moves behind UK’s departure
Published:10:15 Wed 5 May 2021
Follow Jon Henley
Britain’s post-Brexit future was determined by “the quarrels, low blows, multiple betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a certain number of Tory MPs”, the EU’s chief negotiator has said in his long-awaited diaries.
The UK’s early problem, writes Michel Barnier in The Great Illusion, his 500-page account, was that they began by “talking to themselves. And they underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its its consequences.”
Soon, however, the talking turned to Conservative party infighting, and by the end it had become “political piracy … They will go to any length. The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them.”
Published in France on Thursday and in English translation in October, The Great Illusion is a blow-by-blow account of the four years Barnier, a former French cabinet minister and European commissioner who has said he expects to “play a role” in the country’s next presidential election, spent as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator.
In the image of its author, it is mostly courteous, measured and precise: a sober, matter-of-fact – and, to those who followed Brexit’s twists and turns, broadly familiar – account. But that makes its asides and rare outbursts all the more forceful.
At the start of the process, Barnier writes, he promised himself to “pay attention to my words, stick to facts, figures, legal fundamentals – in short, to allow little room for emotion and feeling, to the benefit of objectivity”.
He does not always manage it.
David Davis, he writes, was “warm, truculent, and very self-assured”, Dominic Raab “almost messianic”. Theresa May was “direct, determined … and rather rigid, in her figure and in her attitudes”; Boris Johnson simply “baroque”.
He confesses to being frankly “stupefied” by the Lancaster House speech in which May laid out the early UK’s red lines. “The number of doors she shut, one after the other,” he marvels on 17 January 2017. “I am astonished at the way she has revealed her cards … before we have even started negotiating.”
Ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, halting free movement, leaving the single market and customs union, ending EU budget payments: “Have the consequences of these decisions been thought through, measured, discussed? Does she realise this rules out almost all forms of cooperation we have with our partners?”
May’s proposed timetable – undoing a 44-year partnership via article 50 and agreeing a future relationship, all within two years – also seemed “ambitious to say the least, when it took seven years of intense work to negotiate a simple FTA with Canada”.
Barnier is admiring of Britain’s civil servants, Olly Robbins in particular, praising them as “dignified, competent and lucid”. But he does not envy them, he writes, as talks finally get under way that summer after May’s disastrous early election gamble.
“They have above them a political class who, in part, simply refuse to acknowledge today the direct upshot of the positions they adopted a year ago.” And he is wary throughout of Britain’s strategy, which seems to him to amount mainly to “offering little and taking a lot”, procrastinating, and cherrypicking.
His sympathy does extend to May, “a courageous, tenacious woman surrounded by a lot of men busy putting their personal interests before those of their country”. In the end, Barnier writes, the prime minister “exhausted herself, in a permanent battle with her own ministers and with her parliamentary majority”.
He never saw the point of Brexit, he confesses, and, visiting a capital a week in a marathon effort to forge and maintain EU27 unity, gives the notion of “Global Britain” short shrift. “I do wonder what, until now, has prevented the UK from becoming ‘Global Britain’, other than its own lack of competitiveness,” he writes. “Germany has become ‘Global Germany’ while being firmly inside the EU and the euro zone.”
Brexiters in general and Nigel Farage and his Ukip followers in particular, Barnier writes, had simply behaved “irresponsibly, with regard to the national interests of their own country. How else could they call on people to make such a serious choice without explaining or detailing to them its consequences?”
The post-Chequers resignations of Davis and Johnson in July 2018 prompt the reflection that Johnson had in any event always “treated these negotiations strictly as a domestic matter, and according to the logic of his own Brexit battle”, while their replacements, Raab and Jeremy Hunt, spark little enthusiasm either.
“There is something in his look that surprises me,” writes Barnier of Raab. “He is no doubt fired up by his mission, but I am not sure we will be able to go into the detail of the negotiation with him, take account of facts and realities”.
European “Brexit fatigue” begins to sets in, Barnier writes, in the long months before Theresa May’s decision in May 2019 - following a series of humiliating defeats in the Commons and an inevitable extension to the talks - to step down, and Johnson’s triumphant arrival at No 10 two months later.
“Although his posturing and banter leave him open to it, it would be dangerous to underestimate Johnson,” writes Barnier. But Johnson, too, “advancing like a bulldozer, manifestly trying to muscle his way forwards”, seemed to the negotiator hobbled by the same fundamental British Brexit problem.
When one of Barnier’s 60-strong team explains to Britain’s new prime minister the need for customs and quality checks on the Irish border, Barnier writes, it was “my impression that he became aware, in that discussion, of a series of technical and legal issues that had not been so clearly explained to him by his own team”.
As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes.
With a backstop-free withdrawal agreement finally secured, Britain’s formal exit from the EU on 31 January 2020 leaves the negotiator “torn between emotions. Sadness, obviously: Brexit is a failure for the EU. It is also a waste, for UK and for us. I still do not see the need for it, even from the point of view of Britain’s national interest.”
The transition year talks on a future trade deal were a rollercoaster too, beginning with David Frost’s blunt announcement that London “did not feel bound by the political declaration it had just signed four months ago. That rather set the scene.”
Thereafter came the Internal Market Bill (“a clear breach of international law”) and the UK’s “theatrical”, “almost infantile”, “derisory” threats to walk away over the EU’s level playing field demands, “a psychodrama we could have done without”.
Right up until the end, Barnier writes, the British team kept the Europeans busy, submitting a final legal text on the fraught subject of fisheries on 23 December last year “stuffed with traps, pseudo-compromises and attempts to backtrack”.
In an inauspicious postscript, he warns that while he was “proud to be part of the unity and solidarity of the EU” during the Brexit process, and pleased Britain had left with a functioning deal rather than without one, the bloc must now be vigilant.
British “provocations” over the Irish protocol will continue, he warns, while the UK government, “in an attempt to erase the consequences of the Brexit it provoked, will try to re-enter through the windows the single market whose door it slammed shut. We must be alert to new forms of cherry-picking.”
Nor does he expect London to wait long before “trying to use its new legislative and regulatory autonomy to give itself, sector by sector, a competitive advantage. Will that competition be free and fair? Will regulatory competition … lead to social, economic, fiscal dumping against Europe? We have tools to respond.”
Barnier’s final warning, however, is to the EU itself. “There are lessons to be drawn from Brexit,” he writes. “There are reasons to listen to the popular feeling that expressed itself then, and continues to express itself in many parts of Europe - and to respond to it. That is going to take time, respect and political courage.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ls-betrayals-uk-post-brexit-future-barnier-eu
Revealed: EU’s chief negotiator’s diaries, The Great Illusion, gives blow-by-blow account of moves behind UK’s departure
Published:10:15 Wed 5 May 2021
Follow Jon Henley
Britain’s post-Brexit future was determined by “the quarrels, low blows, multiple betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a certain number of Tory MPs”, the EU’s chief negotiator has said in his long-awaited diaries.
The UK’s early problem, writes Michel Barnier in The Great Illusion, his 500-page account, was that they began by “talking to themselves. And they underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its its consequences.”
Soon, however, the talking turned to Conservative party infighting, and by the end it had become “political piracy … They will go to any length. The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them.”
Published in France on Thursday and in English translation in October, The Great Illusion is a blow-by-blow account of the four years Barnier, a former French cabinet minister and European commissioner who has said he expects to “play a role” in the country’s next presidential election, spent as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator.
In the image of its author, it is mostly courteous, measured and precise: a sober, matter-of-fact – and, to those who followed Brexit’s twists and turns, broadly familiar – account. But that makes its asides and rare outbursts all the more forceful.
At the start of the process, Barnier writes, he promised himself to “pay attention to my words, stick to facts, figures, legal fundamentals – in short, to allow little room for emotion and feeling, to the benefit of objectivity”.
He does not always manage it.
David Davis, he writes, was “warm, truculent, and very self-assured”, Dominic Raab “almost messianic”. Theresa May was “direct, determined … and rather rigid, in her figure and in her attitudes”; Boris Johnson simply “baroque”.
He confesses to being frankly “stupefied” by the Lancaster House speech in which May laid out the early UK’s red lines. “The number of doors she shut, one after the other,” he marvels on 17 January 2017. “I am astonished at the way she has revealed her cards … before we have even started negotiating.”
Ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, halting free movement, leaving the single market and customs union, ending EU budget payments: “Have the consequences of these decisions been thought through, measured, discussed? Does she realise this rules out almost all forms of cooperation we have with our partners?”
May’s proposed timetable – undoing a 44-year partnership via article 50 and agreeing a future relationship, all within two years – also seemed “ambitious to say the least, when it took seven years of intense work to negotiate a simple FTA with Canada”.
Barnier is admiring of Britain’s civil servants, Olly Robbins in particular, praising them as “dignified, competent and lucid”. But he does not envy them, he writes, as talks finally get under way that summer after May’s disastrous early election gamble.
“They have above them a political class who, in part, simply refuse to acknowledge today the direct upshot of the positions they adopted a year ago.” And he is wary throughout of Britain’s strategy, which seems to him to amount mainly to “offering little and taking a lot”, procrastinating, and cherrypicking.
His sympathy does extend to May, “a courageous, tenacious woman surrounded by a lot of men busy putting their personal interests before those of their country”. In the end, Barnier writes, the prime minister “exhausted herself, in a permanent battle with her own ministers and with her parliamentary majority”.
He never saw the point of Brexit, he confesses, and, visiting a capital a week in a marathon effort to forge and maintain EU27 unity, gives the notion of “Global Britain” short shrift. “I do wonder what, until now, has prevented the UK from becoming ‘Global Britain’, other than its own lack of competitiveness,” he writes. “Germany has become ‘Global Germany’ while being firmly inside the EU and the euro zone.”
Brexiters in general and Nigel Farage and his Ukip followers in particular, Barnier writes, had simply behaved “irresponsibly, with regard to the national interests of their own country. How else could they call on people to make such a serious choice without explaining or detailing to them its consequences?”
The post-Chequers resignations of Davis and Johnson in July 2018 prompt the reflection that Johnson had in any event always “treated these negotiations strictly as a domestic matter, and according to the logic of his own Brexit battle”, while their replacements, Raab and Jeremy Hunt, spark little enthusiasm either.
“There is something in his look that surprises me,” writes Barnier of Raab. “He is no doubt fired up by his mission, but I am not sure we will be able to go into the detail of the negotiation with him, take account of facts and realities”.
European “Brexit fatigue” begins to sets in, Barnier writes, in the long months before Theresa May’s decision in May 2019 - following a series of humiliating defeats in the Commons and an inevitable extension to the talks - to step down, and Johnson’s triumphant arrival at No 10 two months later.
“Although his posturing and banter leave him open to it, it would be dangerous to underestimate Johnson,” writes Barnier. But Johnson, too, “advancing like a bulldozer, manifestly trying to muscle his way forwards”, seemed to the negotiator hobbled by the same fundamental British Brexit problem.
When one of Barnier’s 60-strong team explains to Britain’s new prime minister the need for customs and quality checks on the Irish border, Barnier writes, it was “my impression that he became aware, in that discussion, of a series of technical and legal issues that had not been so clearly explained to him by his own team”.
As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes.
With a backstop-free withdrawal agreement finally secured, Britain’s formal exit from the EU on 31 January 2020 leaves the negotiator “torn between emotions. Sadness, obviously: Brexit is a failure for the EU. It is also a waste, for UK and for us. I still do not see the need for it, even from the point of view of Britain’s national interest.”
The transition year talks on a future trade deal were a rollercoaster too, beginning with David Frost’s blunt announcement that London “did not feel bound by the political declaration it had just signed four months ago. That rather set the scene.”
Thereafter came the Internal Market Bill (“a clear breach of international law”) and the UK’s “theatrical”, “almost infantile”, “derisory” threats to walk away over the EU’s level playing field demands, “a psychodrama we could have done without”.
Right up until the end, Barnier writes, the British team kept the Europeans busy, submitting a final legal text on the fraught subject of fisheries on 23 December last year “stuffed with traps, pseudo-compromises and attempts to backtrack”.
In an inauspicious postscript, he warns that while he was “proud to be part of the unity and solidarity of the EU” during the Brexit process, and pleased Britain had left with a functioning deal rather than without one, the bloc must now be vigilant.
British “provocations” over the Irish protocol will continue, he warns, while the UK government, “in an attempt to erase the consequences of the Brexit it provoked, will try to re-enter through the windows the single market whose door it slammed shut. We must be alert to new forms of cherry-picking.”
Nor does he expect London to wait long before “trying to use its new legislative and regulatory autonomy to give itself, sector by sector, a competitive advantage. Will that competition be free and fair? Will regulatory competition … lead to social, economic, fiscal dumping against Europe? We have tools to respond.”
Barnier’s final warning, however, is to the EU itself. “There are lessons to be drawn from Brexit,” he writes. “There are reasons to listen to the popular feeling that expressed itself then, and continues to express itself in many parts of Europe - and to respond to it. That is going to take time, respect and political courage.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ls-betrayals-uk-post-brexit-future-barnier-eu
Interesting read.
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I’m definitely going to pick this up once the English version is out. I’ve met him a couple of times via work and he always seemed pleasant enough
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Divorces are never pretty
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At least we got to keep the house. I think thats what it was all about, so everyone should be pleased now.
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UK sends navy vessels to Jersey amid post-Brexit fishing row with France
Boris Johnson dispatches two patrol boats to protect island from feared blockade
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Interesting and balanced assessment IMO
https://www.project-syndicate.org/c...don-financial-center-by-howard-davies-2021-05
A Brexit Post-Mortem for the City
May 18, 2021HOWARD DAVIES
Almost five years after the Brexit referendum, and five months after Britain's exit from the European Union, the future of London as a global financial center seems secure. But although the City will remain Europe’s largest financial marketplace, its Golden Age as Europe’s financial capital is over.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/c...don-financial-center-by-howard-davies-2021-05
A Brexit Post-Mortem for the City
May 18, 2021HOWARD DAVIES
Almost five years after the Brexit referendum, and five months after Britain's exit from the European Union, the future of London as a global financial center seems secure. But although the City will remain Europe’s largest financial marketplace, its Golden Age as Europe’s financial capital is over.
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The sooner the EU is disbanded altogether the better, for virtually every country within it.
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How so?
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Because it’s a cash cow for the Eurocrats and doesn’t offer much in return for the people of the majority of the countries in the union.
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You got any details?
UK have left and im not really seeing many benefits at the moment.
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Well sorry about that, it’s only just happened, these things take time and the complete process is not even finished yet.
Would you comment to a newly divorced person within weeks of their break up that they are still single so therefore it was all a mistake?
Give it chance.
The key benefit worth noting is that UK can now negotiate trade deals with the rest of the world and import goods at fair prices rather than be crippled by EU restraints.
The freedom of movement was also getting out of control and should never have applied to Britain as it’s an island, whereas mainland Europe is a very large landmass where freedom of movement makes sense.
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Give it a chance? Thought they had an oven ready deal?
It's a fucking shitshow and if you were as clued up as you say you are you'd see that.
