Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt urges EU not to mistake British politeness for weakness after Brexit negotiations reached an impasse
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Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has urged the EU not to mistake British politeness for weakness after Brexit negotiations reached an impasse.
British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday demanded new proposals and respect from European Union leaders, saying after a summit in Austria that talks had hit an impasse – a position her foreign minister reinforced on Saturday, even if that meant leaving the bloc next March without a deal.
“If the EU’s view is that just by saying no to every proposal made by the United Kingdom, we will eventually capitulate and end up either with a Norway option or indeed staying in the EU… then they’ve profoundly misjudged he British people,” Jeremy Hunt told BBC radio.
After rejecting the UK’s proposals, Donald Tusk, head of the European Council, posted a provocative picture on Instagram featuring UK PM Theresa May “cherry-picking” a cake.
Mr Tusk has since said he admires Mrs May, and a compromise is possible. But Mr Hunt said Mr Tusk needed to avoid “revving up” the situation.
He insisted it was time for people in the EU “to step back from the abyss” of a no-deal Brexit, to “sit down and to talk to us about how we can make these sensible, concrete proposals actually work”. Mrs May tried to sell her proposals for the UK’s future relationship with the EU at a summit in Salzburg, Austria, this week.
The plan – the so-called Chequers agreement – was agreed by the UK government in July.
But EU leaders rejected a major part of her plan, saying the new economic partnership she had put forward would “not work” and risked “undermining the single market”.
Mrs May later delivered a televised statement in Downing Street in which she said the EU’s rejection of her plan without offering an alternative was “unacceptable”. She also made it clear she was ready to walk away from the negotiations rather than accept a “bad deal”.
Meanwhile, Theresa May is heading for a showdown with her Cabinet next week when ministers will call for a “Plan B” alternative to her Chequers Brexit deal. The Cabinet meeting on Monday, which was due to discuss migration policy, will now be dominated by Mrs May’s Salzburg humiliation.
The Prime Minister will be urged to offer an alternative to the proposal, agreed at her country residence in July, to keep the UK tied to the EU after Brexit – or face resignations. One source said: “Monday is the crunch point. That’s when every Cabinet minister will have to look again and reassess like Boris [Johnson] and David Davis did.”
