The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator has taken apart Theresa May‘s new Chequers Brexit plan, just hours after the embattled Prime Minister insisted there would be no further compromise on her side.
Speaking in Brussels after a meeting with EU national ministers Michel Barnier raised a wide variety of serious concerns with the PM’s proposals on customs control and single market regulations for goods.
Mr Barnier said Ms May’s complicated proposal for customs would likely create huge amounts of new paperwork, warning: Brexit cannot and will not justify additional bureaucracy.
Ms May had hoped the proposal would allow frictionless trade with the EU, but Mr Barnier said the plan to exclude UK services from following EU rules could give a significant competitive advantage to Britain and that agreeing to such a policy might not be in the EU’s own best interests.
He also suggested it would be unreasonable to exclude some goods such as animal feed from the rulebook, as proposed by the UK side, stating: We have a duty of care to protect consumer sin the single market and on which basis could we accept the free circulation of goods?
The chief negotiator also said the EU could not delegate collection of its own customs duties to a country that was not a member state suggesting that the backbone of the PM’s proposal might not even be legally feasible. Mr Barnier also said there would be practical problems determining which tariff to apply to goods and that there was major risk of fraud.
But he was was careful not to reject the plan outright, phrasing his criticism as questions to the UK negotiators. Mr Barnier said the plan was positive in many ways, including the UK signing up to EU level playing field competition rules, the creation of a free trade agreement, and on security cooperation.
There’s no justification for us to create additional burdens on business just because the UK wants to leave, he told reporters in Brussels.
If you look at the political situation today we have many reasons to keep and protect our single market, find ways of cooperating with the UK, whilst respecting their decision to leave the EU and looking at the red lines of the UK. They’re the ones who established the red lines.
The intervention by Mr Barnier represents the first response from the to the PM’s white paper, which Boris Johnson, David Davis, and the majority of ministers at the Department for Exiting the EU quit the government over.
The EU official reiterated that the UK needed to agree to a backstop solution to the Northern Ireland border if it wanted a withdrawal agreement and did not want to crash out with no deal come March. He stated that there were just 13 weeks of talks left.
Earlier on Friday the Prime Minister gave a speech in Belfast in which she reiterated that she would not accept the EU’s plan for a Northern Ireland backstop.
The EU says it is focused on solving the Northern Ireland issue to prevent a no deal but the UK, has said it does not believe a withdrawal agreement would be accepted by Parliament without a detailed proposal on trade such as the one in the White Paper.