If the Conservative Party wins a majority the upcoming UK election – as the latest polls are predicting – the EU will need to brace itself for a tough second phase of Brexit talks.
A poll this week (by YouGov, for The Times newspaper) predicts the Conservatives will win a 68-seat majority in the 12 December election. If that comes to pass, it will pave the way for the UK to approve the withdrawal agreement and leave the EU by 31 January. Then, the more difficult task of hammering out a mandate for future trade negotiations will begin, a process that could sour relations between the two sides even further.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, called on all Brexit supporters to vote conservative, warning that a Labour government, supported by the Scottish National Party, would “cheat” Brexit by giving EU citizens a vote in a second referendum. “It’s guaranteed chaos,” he wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Giving millions of foreign citizens a vote on membership of the EU is a bad joke.”
The EU is already making preparations for the talks ahead. The European Commission’s Article 50 task force recently rebranded as the “Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom”. The task force is hiring extra staff, with Michel Barnier continuing to lead the negotiations. Jean-Claude Juncker, writing in Politico’s Playbook on Friday, called Mr Barnier “the most capable divorce lawyer in town” and said one silver lining to the Brexit cloud is the unexpected surge in support for the EU.
But the good mood won’t last long. Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, warns that the 11 months currently scheduled for the future relationship talks “is too little” to negotiate a wide-ranging trade deal, and says the EU “will therefore prioritise negotiations in areas in which ‘no deal 2.0’ would have the biggest implications for the EU and the UK”: trade and security. She says the Commission, Council and Parliament should seek to replicate way the talks worked in phase two, with Didier Seeuws at the helm of the Council’s Brexit working group and a parliamentary Brexit coordinator to keep MEPs in the loop.
However, former UK ambassador to the EU, Ivan Rogers, says it’s “time for the EU to think more clearly and strategically about its future relations with the UK” and for both sides to rebuilt trust. “Because [relations] can get a lot worse than this yet,” he said in a lecture at the University of Glasgow. Free movement is one area where he says the EU and UK are missing the point by threatening to strip rights from each other’s citizens. Neither position “is a particularly rational view about life with your nearest neighbours”. EU-UK relations "can either now go seriously pear-shaped for a really long time, or can still be rebuilt on new foundations”. (Sarah Collins)