The respective EU and UK negotiators on the future post-Brexit relationship, Michel Barnier and David Frost, spoke again on the phone on Wednesday 21 October. In the wake of this, the British government announced the resumption of talks later in the week.
“On the basis of this conversation, we are ready to welcome the EU team to London to resume negotiations later this week”, Boris Johnson’s government spokesman said, as quoted by Reuters.
The Commission has confirmed this announcement and will therefore visit London from 22 October until 25 October. Both sides also committed themselves, in a written text, to intensive negotiations on the basis of legal texts, as requested by London.
The call came after two more telephone exchanges earlier this week to get London back to the negotiating table and after the EU negotiator reiterated his position to the European Parliament on Wednesday morning.
While the two sides had indeed left on bad terms at the end of last week, after the conclusions of the European Council deemed disappointing by the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, Michel Barnier reiterated the Commission’s readiness to “intensify” the discussions. Michel Barnier even considered that an agreement was “within reach” despite the difficulties, if both sides agreed to make efforts and compromises.
Taking care to respond to British requests for reinsurance, he said the principles guiding the EU in these trade negotiations, including economic ‘fair play’, are “not incompatible with British sovereignty, which is a legitimate concern” of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
He also stressed that the EU’s attitude had not changed in these negotiations and “will not change”, whereas last week British negotiators had said they understood that the EU-27 no longer wanted to negotiate, which the EU negotiator denied: “we are determined and will seek the compromises necessary to have an agreement until the last day”. “Our door will remain open”, Michel Barnier repeated.
In another gesture of appeasement, the EU negotiator further indicated that “it goes without saying that any agreement implies constraints between the two parties, mutually accepted” and, even if “time is increasingly limited, we are ready to provide solutions to our British friends”.
A deliberately soothing speech, which did not go unnoticed on the British side, the government spokesman immediately indicated that the negotiator’s speech had been received “with interest”.
Mr Barnier “commented significantly on the issues that are at the root of the current difficulties in our discussions. We are carefully studying what has been said”, he said.
On the side of the European Parliament, however, this sequence of dispute and then reconciliation expected between the two parties was not very well received, with many elected representatives hoping that London would “stop taking us for a ride”, as the president of Renew Europe, Romanian Dacian Cioloș, put it.
The British government “must agree to sit down at the negotiating table”, he said, recalling also that his group will not ratify the treaty as long as the British Internal Market Act containing provisions in breach of the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol is on the table.
For his part, the EPP rapporteur on future trade relations, Christophe Hansen (Luxembourg), summed up the feeling of part of the Chamber: “London is sulking”, he said, “because its third artificial deadline (October 15, editor’s note) was missed. Well, in my opinion, the British government has lost the right to be disappointed when it introduced a bill to unilaterally cancel an agreement that was the result of more than 3 years of work”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)