Negotiations on the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU will start on 3 March, more than a month after the UK’s departure from the bloc, the Guardian can reveal.
As a British minister attended an EU meeting in Brussels for the final time after 47 years of membership of the bloc, sources disclosed that officials led by Michel Barnier and Boris Johnson’s Europe adviser, David Frost, would embark on the vital talks in the first week of March with a challenging 10-month deadline. [...]
A leaked internal document from the EU member states, seen by the Guardian, notes that without a deal by the end of December 2020, there will be a “cliff edge” in many areas and “no return to the status quo”.
The former European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker had said the negotiations on the future relationship would start on day one after the UK’s exit but preparations on both sides of the Channel were delayed by the general election.
Chris Pincher, the UK’s minister for Europe and the Americas, said after his general affairs council meeting with peers among the 27 other member states – the last by a British minister in an EU setting – that it was a “historic week” when the “government will deliver on its promise”.
Pincher said the UK was leaving the bloc’s institutions as a “sovereign equal” but that it would not be leaving Europe with which the country had a shared “history, civilisation and values”.
Once the talks on the future relationship start in earnest on 3 March, it will be access to fishing waters and the EU’s demand for a “level playing field” that are likely to pose the biggest obstacles to success. [...]
Full article on The Guardian
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