Barnier has told the commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and other senior officials that the stakes are so high because Berlin and Paris are refusing to pay more to cover the UK’s departure, while those governments who receive the most from EU funds are opposed to any cuts in spending.
“Mr Barnier considered that this issue would doubtless be one of the most difficult in the negotiation,” the minutes of a top-level meeting held earlier this month note.
“However, should there be no agreement on this point, he believed that the risk of failing to reach an agreement on an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom would become real, since none of the 27 member states wished to contribute more to the current multi-annual financial framework or receive less in projects financed under the framework.”
As positions have hardened on the continent, with estimates of the size of the bill now reaching as much as €100bn, Juncker noted that Theresa May appeared to be softening up the British public for failure to strike a deal.
The minutes show that the commission president warned Barnier that he feared that the EU negotiator’s hopes of coming to an agreement by the end of the year were over-optimistic. “He [Juncker] noted that on the UK side, the government was trying to gain credence for the idea that if agreement were not reached on all the negotiating points, including those in the second phase, there would be no overall agreement on its orderly withdrawal,” the official minutes report. “He also expressed concerns about the ambition of the timetable referred to, since he considered that some of the matters to be negotiated in the first phase would take time.”
The commission then discussed “the need to integrate in the parameters for the future negotiations the growing support in British public opinion for the idea of a disorderly exit of the UK from the union”, the minutes say.
Barnier told the meeting that he “hoped that after the British legislative elections the UK’s internal political climate would be more conducive to reaching agreement”.
The former French finance minister, however, told his colleagues that “since a general election had been called for 8 June in the United Kingdom [negotiations] would not in fact be launched before mid-June”, rather than the end of this month. [...]
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