Do you remember David Davis, back in the day when he was the Brexit man, saying the future relationship would need to be set out in detail in the Withdrawal Agreement otherwise parliament wouldn't accept the divorce bill? This was his position in April this year speaking to American financiers in London. According to Business Insider (HERE):
"The Brexit Secretary, speaking at a Wall Street Journal event in London, said the final deal — which both sides hope to agree by October — should include "a lot of detail" on the future relationship in key areas such as regulation and trade.
EU negotiators reportedly want the deal to include a vague political declaration — sometimes known as a "heads of agreement" — and then thrash out the details during a transition phase after Britain leaves in March next year.
However, Davis said today that there was "no point having an implementation period if you’re not sure what you’re going to implement."
"The withdrawal agreement is a payment of up to £39 billion. It's a lot of money, and parliament is unlikely to sign off on it unless we can be pretty substantive about what is going to be there in the long run," he said".
At the time he seemed to be suggesting we would have almost a fully fledged agreement, not perhaps signed and sealed, but good enough to start planning for implementation. I think the chances of that are slim to nil.
Well, now that the EU negotiators have had the chance to examine the Chequers White Paper some of them are beginning to speak off the record. The Guardian (HERE) report the future relationship paper could be as short as four or five papers according to one senior, unnamed EU official:
"A senior EU official told The Guardian that the paper could even be as short as “four or five pages”, the same length as the European council guidelines setting out the bloc’s headline objectives. “It can either be four five pages, or it could be a bit more elaborate but I think we are in the league of five to 25 to 35 pages. We have not time to thrash out the details,” the official said. “The more details you want the more advanced you should be in these negotiations.”
But the EU are far more realistic than our side and always seem to focus laser like on the absolutely central issue. Listen to this from the EU official:
“We will probably get bogged down in very intense negotiations over Ireland and probably on the future relationship. Because the core of Chequers is not really workable so this will cost us some acrimonious discussions.
“The question is can we make something out of this that serves a purpose or really not. Is it still something feasible, departing from a literal reading from Chequers? That’s the real question.”
I take this to mean unless we indicate some flexibility to shift from the Chequers WP position then there is no point in continuing the future relationship talks at all. That is in so far as anything substantial is happening anyway, all the main effort is still on the separation issues.
Never mind 239 days to go.
