No-deal Brexit will be fault of UK government alone, says Juncker
Daniel Boffey, Jennifer Rankin, Groon, Sep 27 2019
Jean-Claude Juncker has said blame for a no-deal Brexit will lie solely with the British government after the UK’s latest efforts to fix the problem of the Irish border were found wanting. Ahead of a second visit to Brussels within as many weeks by the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, the European commission president emphasised the EU’s desire for a mutually satisfactory agreement. Juncker told the German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine:
We are working hard on a deal. An exit of the British from the EU without agreement would be a disaster for the United Kingdom and for the European continent. Our chief negotiator Michel Barnier and I are doing everything we can to reach an agreement. If this fails in the end, the responsibility lies solely with the British side.
The two negotiating sides are wide apart on the fundamentals of how to deal with the problem of the Irish border, and there is growing and grave scepticism that the government will be able to produce anything reasonable for leaders to sign off on at a crunch summit on Oct 17. The UK has insisted that Northern Ireland cannot be “left behind” in the EU’s single market and shared customs territory, nor can the whole of the UK be “trapped” in the bloc’s structures simply to avoid a hard border. Barclay emphasised in a recent speech in Madrid that any deal must recognise that there will be two regulatory zones on the island of Ireland. The government insists that controls and checks on trade through the border can be done in a light-touch way to ensure there is no infrastructure or huge changes to the local economy. The EU has said that, as yet, there does not appear to be any solution beyond Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland remaining in regulatory alignment. A source said:
What they are proposing is for us to ignore huge blocks of EU law, make massive derogations for them. It doesn’t work.
On the eve of his meeting with Barclay, Barnier told EU ambassadors that the proposals so far tabled by the UK were not workable. He reiterated that time was running out, adding in an aside that the dramatic scenes in Westminster did not offer much confidence that a majority for any deal could be found. A source said:
But the biggest obstacle to a deal remains the absence until now of serious, workable proposals.
Several EU diplomats told Barnier that the UK would have to table “serious” plans to replace the Irish backstop by the end of next week, immediately after the Conservative party conference in Manchester. an EU diplomat said:
The clock is ticking. After that, time would be in too short supply.
But the person added that the mood around the table was “highly sceptical” that it will be possible to agree a deal because of the “political situation” in London. If the UK fails to produce proposals within the next seven days, EU diplomats say their governments will not have enough time to assess the politically sensitive and deeply technical issues at stake. The pessimistic mood deepened after the UK presented earlier this week its latest discussion paper on breaking the backstop deadlock, a six-page document on moving food, animal and plant products between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as part of a plan for an all-Ireland agri-food zone. EU diplomats are unhappy that the UK seems to be picking holes in the logic of the EU’s strict rules on food, animal and plant safety (sanitary and phytosanitary or SPS measures). One source described the mood thus:
If you are staying in our SPS zone you don’t get to start second guessing the logic of it. I sense an extra frustration. There is a bit of a “how dare you!” kind of line.
Voicing his frustrations, Barnier told the diplomats:
They are basically asking us to organise shortfalls and imperfections at our border.
While EU diplomats were focused on technical talks, many have been aghast at the UK prime minister’s performance in the Commons on Wednesday night. EU officials feel Johnson and his ministers have burned bridges with Labour and one-nation Tories. A source asked:
How do you get to a point where if magically you get to a deal at the European council, you are able to get the Commons to vote it through?
A second diplomat added:
There was very little talk of recent developments in Westminster, if only to note that it seemed increasingly difficult to see how the government would obtain a majority for a deal, given the divisions getting more entrenched by the day.
When asked if Johnson had ever lied about the EU, an EC spox said:
I think Pres Juncker himself has said in a number of interviews, without referring to PM Johnson himself but referring to events related to the brexit referendum campaign, has said he should have intervened because a lot of untruths were told back then. He would have been quite busy correcting all these untruths every day, but he was not referring specifically to PM Johnson, with whom he has a constructive exchange, but indeed it does matter that we all stay true to the facts as much as possible.
Niqnaq 