The fifth round of negotiations begins on Monday in Brussels but with little hope of a breakthrough. The Telegraph (HERE) seems to believe our negotiators will refuse to say what financial commitments made during our membership we intend to pay towards. This alone will scupper any prospect of talks beginning on trade anytime soon. It may even cause a complete breakdown.
If it is true that we will not be setting out what we think we owe, it will be bizarre. We began by agreeing the talks schedule which included the financial settlement as one of the first three items. We then send someone to demolish the EU's legal basis for believing we owe anything. Mrs May's Florence speech just before round 4 then conceded we "will honour commitments we have made during the period of our membership". But we failed to bring a list of what these were during round 4 but said we were not "in a position yet to identify [..] commitments taken during membership". Now apparently we are back to square one. The Standard's take on it is HERE.
This is not going to help us in the slightest. A time bomb is ticking but we are acting as if it isn't.
Next week will be crucial. Barnier will make a recommendation to the European Council and he will almost certainly conclude there has been insufficient progress. The European Council will then need to decide what happens next. It would be a huge surprise if the EU make any concessions and in fact they are starting to prepare for the talks to collapse (HERE).
We are approaching another humiliating moment. We are either going to have to walk away or make more compromises. If we walk away the markets will react I'm sure and the pound, already trading close to a low against the Euro is bound to fall further. Banks and businesses will start to execute contingency plans and move operations to Europe. If this happens it will weaken our position further. It will be an enormous gamble, the biggest that David Davis has ever taken.
If the EU bend even a little, it will send a message that the UK has the upper hand. They cannot afford this and so it will not happen.
Syed Kamall, the Tory MEP has written a piece for ConHome (HERE) laughably claiming that the time pressure of negotiating against the clock is being felt by both sides. He forgets that the EU don't have a clock since they can extend the time limit whenever they wish. He then criticises them for not helping us to design the magic invisible border in Ireland, the one we need because we voted for Brexit and we decided to leave the customs union. He thinks Brussels is deliberately dragging it's feet on the border issue because a solution could be a template for invisible borders at Dover and elsewhere. I'm not clear why someone under time pressure is deliberately dragging their feet but maybe Mr Kamal can explain this.
Perhaps the EU are not interested in designing invisible borders for us because they already have them in the customs union. We reject their solution and want them to help us design another.
Why none of the Brexiteers thought about this for the thirty years they have been trying to get us out of Europe is a mystery.
