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[...]“We are still aiming to get to the 29 March [departure] — that’s the date we promised the British people. The answer is to reach an agreement as quickly as possible. And I think there are factors frankly driving that process,” Mr Fox told an event hosted by the Policy Exchange think-tank on Friday.
“Yesterday we saw that Italy is now officially in recession. We’ve seen the weakness in the German economy, in the French economy. “This is not a good time to introduce further unnecessary instability into that European economy. This is why I hope the European Union will recognise that the best way forward for all of us is to get an agreement as quickly as possible.”
On Thursday, official preliminary data showed the Italian economy fell into a technical recession in the last half of 2018.
Last week, the German government downgraded its forecast for economic growth this year as business confidence in the eurozone’s largest economy sank to a three-year low. [...]
Speaking in central London, Mr Fox also became the latest minister to suggest Brexit may need to be delayed if there was not time for all the relevant Brexit legislation to be approved by MPs by March 29. [...]
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