Brexit

It’s been a busy week for Brexit, with David Davis and Michel Barnier going head-to-head in Brussels, and Theresa May and Liam Fox heading to Japan to try and kick-start a trade deal. Here’s how the week unfolded: 1. UK-Japan trade deal lined up: In spite of predictions to the contrary, Theresa May won reassurance from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Britain would benefit from a facsimile version of the trade deal being negotiated between Japan and the EU. This could be the first of a series of ‘cut and paste’ bilateral trade deals which the government wants to establish with countries which already have trade agreements with the EU –

There is a growing perception that Britain is floundering in its EU negotiations, with a professional team from Brussels running rings around our bumbling amateurs. It is an idea that is being put about by the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, who this week appealed for Britain to begin ‘negotiating seriously’. As he has found out, the strange dynamic of British public debate at present means that EU spin is repeated uncritically by those hostile to Brexit. It can seem, at times, as if we are in the grip of hysteria normally seen during the final days of an election campaign. This is not to say that the British side

Fifty billion? Seventy-five? In its wilder moments, the FT might even splash on a hundred billion pounds as the minimum cost of our exit from the European Union. As the negotiations over our departure reach perhaps the thorniest issue of all, the final bill will have to be settled. But what should it be? If the hardliners on both side would calm down for a moment, then the answer should be very simple. We should agree to cover the cost of the disruption our departure creates, but only in return for a fair deal on trade. It is probably a mystery to most people why we have to pay anything

Is the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier actually serious about doing his job, wonders the Sun. In its editorial, the paper says that yesterday ‘yet another round’ of talks went by with hardly any progress. Once again, Barnier used the lack of any substance to complain. But the Sun is questioning whether this is all part of the plan: ‘The suspicion grows daily that Mr Barnier is hoping…to lengthen the impasse’, and that by doing so he’ll force the government to back down – or hold out for a second referendum to put paid to Brexit for good. This approach shows a ‘contemptible disregard’ for British voters who backed Brexit, argues the Sun. Yet

A new word has entered the lexicon – Brexodus – to reflect the claim that Europeans are leaving in droves as they shun post-Brexit Britain. But it is a funny sort of Brexodus which leaves the number of European nationals in Britain at an all-time high. While the quarterly immigration figures did show a significant reduction in the scale of EU immigration to the UK, and a rise in the number of Europeans departing, those figures also showed that twice as many Europeans came to the UK as departed from it, with an estimated 122,000 EU nationals leaving the UK while 249,000 arrived in the year to March 2017. There have

For months, Labour has been moving ever closer to the Tory position on Brexit while pretending that it isn’t. First, it backed Brexit. Then in June, John McDonnell told Robert Peston that he couldn’t see continued membership of the single market being ‘on the table’ in Brexit negotiations. He added that people would interpret membership of the single market as ‘not respecting that referendum.’ In July, Jeremy Corbyn told Andrew Marr that single market membership is ‘dependent on membership of the EU.’ Barry Gardiner has even suggested that the UK would become a ‘vassal state’ if it were to remain in the single market after Brexit. Today, Sir Keir Starmer writes in the Observer that, unlike Liam Fox and Philip Hammond,

Spare a thought for David Davis over the bank holiday weekend. As revellers descend on Notting Hill Carnival on Monday, the Brexit Secretary will be at the negotiating table in Brussels for the third round of Brexit talks. With the EU 27 adamant that trade talks can only begin once progress has been made on the other issues, the focus will be on the Brexit ‘divorce bill’, the rights of EU nationals, and the Irish border. Given how uphill talks have been so far, the expectation in Whitehall is that this could be a bad-tempered outing for both sides. Michel Barnier – the EU’s chief negotiator – is expected to,

It has been a summer of tears, both of joy and sorrow. The latter first: how could stones not weep at the spectacle of this Gadarene government leading us towards the cliff edge with a show of insouciance on the part of Fox, Davis, Johnson that would be thought excessive at a wedding, never mind a funeral? At Daily Telegraph leader conferences 25 years ago, our young turks bewailed John Major’s government as the worst in history. Bill Deedes justly rebuked such hyperbole: ‘Are we really saying that Samuel Hoare was a better foreign secretary than Malcolm Rifkind?’ Today, however, it is hard to name a senior minister, with the