Johnson signals that a Brexit Deal became ‘very difficult’
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Boris Johnson has signalled that the UK is currently heading towards a no-deal Brexit as progress in negotiations with the EU has become “very difficult”, The Independent reports.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said an agreement was “still possible” but warned it would not be easy to achieve due to differences in opinion between the two sides.
The Guardian reports that the UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, is meeting his EU counterpart Michel Barnier in London, in advance of the next round of formal talks next week.
But with the clock ticking to 31 December, when the status quo transition is due to end, Boris Johnson’s official spokesman conceded that hopes of a deal were dwindling. “The EU continues to insist that we must agree on difficult areas in the negotiations, such as EU state aid, before any further work can be done in any other area of the negotiations, including on legal texts, and that makes it very difficult to make progress,” the spokesman said.
Johnson’s government is reluctant to cede any control over state aid policy, boasting during last year’s election campaign that one benefit of Brexitwould be that the government could intervene more readily to help struggling UK businesses.
The prime minister’s spokesman underlined that message on Tuesday, saying: “We’ll set out further detail of our domestic regime in due course. After the transition period, the UK will have its own regime of subsidy control, and will not be subject to the EU’s state aid regime. We have been very clear about that throughout.”
He added: “The UK’s future subsidy arrangements are a matter for the British people and parliament, not the European Union.”
Brussels regards state aid constraints as a key aspect of ensuring a level playing field, so that UK businesses cannot unfairly undercut their EU counterparts. With an EU council expected to be held in October to finalise any free trade agreement, time is running short.
POLITICO reports that the talks on a future trade deal between the EU and the U.K. have turned into a game of chicken, increasing the chances of a no-deal outcome by the end of the year when the transition period agreed as part of the divorce package comes to an end. The two sides remain at an impasse on various issues, the thorniest being so-called level playing field rules, designed to prevent the U.K. from undercutting the EU in the future, and fisheries. And while there has been progress on other aspects of the negotiations, the EU insists on “parallelism” — blocking progress in one area as long as there isn’t progress in others to prevent a series of mini-deals that would benefit the U.K.
