Britain will have less than 18 months to negotiate its departure from the European Union, the bloc’s chief Brexit negotiator has said, stressing that the final deal must be inferior to full membership.
Michel Barnier did, however, hold out the possibility of a “short transitional agreement” to bridge the gap between the UK’s exit and the start of its future relationship with the EU, saying it could be useful if the two sides had “a clear perspective” of what form the final relationship would take.
“Time will be very short,” he said in Brussels, pointing out that at the beginning of the formal two-year article 50 exit process, the European council would need time to define its stance, and at the end the council, the European parliament and the UK government would have to approve the deal.
“It’s clear that the actual negotiation period will be shorter than two years,” he said. “All in all, there will be less than 18 months. If, as Theresa May has said, we receive notification by the end of March, it is safe to say the negotiations could start a few weeks later and article 50 agreement would have to be reached by October 2018.”
The European commission’s chief Brexit negotiator has assembled a 30-person taskforce to bring about the deal and so far visited 18 of the 27 other member states to hear their views. He said the EU’s approach to the talks would be based on four key principles.
Speaking at his first press conference since his appointment, Barnier said the EU was determined first and foremost to “preserve the unity and interests of the EU-27”, adding that it was also important that Britain did not enjoy the same conditions once it left.
“Being a member of the EU comes with rights and benefits,” he said. “Third countries can never have these rights and benefits.”
He poured cold water on May’s unsuccessful attempts to strike a deal on the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and vice versa before article 50 is triggered, saying there would be “no negotiations without notification”.
Finally, Barnier insisted, as EU leaders and officials have repeatedly done since the referendum in June, that the bloc’s single market and four fundamental freedoms – free movement of goods, services, capital and people – were indivisible. “There can be no cherry picking,” he said.
It was too early to say whether and how any transition period may be agreedfollowing Brexit, he said. It is an option sought by many British businesses to avoid the potentially catastrophic “cliff-edge” of a sudden departure with no future EU-UK trade deal in sight.
He said a transitional arrangement “could have some point” if it eased the path towards a future relationship, but it would depend on the kind of partnership the UK envisaged and what the EU-27 and Brussels institutions were prepared to accept.
“It is up to the UK to tell us what they have in mind, and then it is up to us to say what we are prepared to conceive of,” he said. But not knowing what the UK wanted meant “it is going to be difficult to talk about a transitional period”.
Because any future agreement can only be established with a third country once it is outside the EU, it would be “legally impossible” for this to be discussed at the same time as the exit agreement, he said.
Asked about the post-Brexit land border between the UK and the EU in Ireland, Barnier said he was “very aware of its importance” and the significance of the Northern Ireland peace process to the border, and would do his utmost not to damage its success so far.
On the debate in Britain over a hard Brexit leaving the UK outside the single market or a soft Brexit preserving more of the existing ties, Barnier said he could not say what the difference was.
“I can say what Brexit is,” he said. “We want a clear agreement, we want to reach this agreement in the limited time we have available and we want it to take account of our point of view, the interests of the 27 as defined by the European council, and [be] something that preserves the unity of the 27.”
Europe had assembled a solid team combining all the necessary expertise and would be ready to begin talks as soon as it received formal notification, said Barnier, who expects to complete his EU-27 tour by the end of January.
A former French minister who ruffled feathers in London when he was the EU financial services commissioner, Barnier recalled that he had voted yes in a French referendum to approve the accession of the UK to the European Economic Community in 1973, adding that he still thought he had made the right choice.
But, he said, everyone involved in Brexit was entering uncharted waters. “This work will be legally complex, politically sensitive and will have important consequences for our economies and for our people on both sides of the Channel.” The message, he said in English, was: “Keep calm and negotiate.”
May’s deputy spokesman admitted that Barnier’s comments represented the first time he had been made aware of the fact that European officials want to complete Brexit negotiations within 18 months.
He said the Brexit process belonged to the UK as much as any other European country and that there was a clear timetable set out in the treaties.
“The European negotiating team and their approach is a matter for them. We’ve been clear on our timetable and we are not moving away from that,” he said.
Asked if Barnier’s position was known by the prime minister, civil servants or diplomats involved in the process, he said: “That is quite a broad church you’ve asked me to comment on there. It is the first that I had heard of it. We are focused on getting the right deal.”
The spokesman said, however, that he had not been able to speak to the prime minister since the press conference in Brussels because she was in Bahrain.
Pushed on whether Barnier was simply setting out the EU’s timetable as dictated by article 50, with 18 months for a deal and then extra time for countries to ratify the outcome, the spokesman said: “It is our article 50 treaty as well, as we are members of the EU. And the timetable is clear in that – we have been clear that once we’ve triggered article 50, we will use the negotiations to secure the best possible deal we can while not extending the process.”
He said Barnier’s warning about cherry picking was not new. “He is not saying anything that hasn’t been said before by the European Union; we are clear that what we are about is achieving a new deal for Britain with the EU.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/06/uk-will-have-under-18-months-to-negotiate-deal-says-eus-brexit-broker
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