After her disastrous speech at the Conservative party conference, Theresa May is in desperate need of some good news as she puts her reputation on the line by unexpectedly heading to Brussels and personally intervening in the stalled Brexit talks. News of the meeting came as a surprise to some in Westminster, although 10 Downing Street insisted that tonight’s dinner with EU leaders “had been in the diary for weeks.”
Unfortunately for Mrs May, the precedent for Brexit dinners is neither successful nor enjoyable. As the Telegraph reports, last time Mrs May had dinner with EU Commission President, Jean Claude Juncker, in April, Mr Juncker “was reported to have launched a scathing attack on Mrs May…saying that Brexit ‘cannot be a success’.
Maybe he’d had too many cognacs again.
Yesterday, in an effort to tip the odds slightly more in her favour, May phoned the only person that Mr Juncker might take instructions from, Angela Merkel. Downing Street claimed that the phone conversation focused on Iran (right), but acknowledged that they agreed on the importance of “constructive progress” in the Brexit negotiations. According to the FT “Theresa May has personally urged Angela Merkel to end the Brexit stand-off at this week’s EU summit in Brussels after Berlin and Paris led moves to toughen the EU’s negotiating line in the next phase of talks.”
Inexplicably, the Germans and the French were concerned that a draft statement for this week’s summit might raise UK hopes about what could be achieved in December 2017. This is the next time that EU leaders gather to assess whether enough progress has been made on negotiating the monetary settlement to begin talks on the future relationship (transition and trade, etc).
The FT quotes a colleague of Mrs May as saying “We’ve almost run out of things to talk about…it comes down to money.”
There seems little hope for Mrs May if Merkel is backing a tougher negotiating stance and, right from the start, the EU has put money first, everything else second.
The following summary of the key issues in the “divorce bill” comes from today’s Telegraph. It will be calculated based on the following:
- The ongoing EU budget. The current EU budgetary period began in 2014 and continues until 2020 – a year after the UK is expected to withdraw. EU negotiators argue that the UK government voted to contribute funding to, for example, long-term infrastructure projects, until 2020. The UK government would rather these funding commitments ended in 2019.
- Liabilities for loans. The UK has backed EU development lending to other member states, for example Ireland, Ukraine and Portugal. The EU wants us to make funds available to cover the chance of these loans defaulting. This money would eventually be repaid as each of the loans clears.
- Pension promises. The UK would be expected to cover the pension contributions of EU officials employed during its membership period.
- Other expenses. For example, two European Union agencies are currently based in the UK. The European Banking Authority and the European Medicines Agency will need to relocate after Brexit.
Considerations reducing this amount will be:
- The UK’s standard rebate from all EU contributions.
- A discount of whatever future EU spending had been allocated to the UK
- A share of assets, such as capital from the European Central Bank or the value of European Union buildings built during our membership
If May cannot make progress and the chances of a “no-deal” Brexit rise, her position will be further undermined as MPs from her own party hold talks with the opposition Labour Party for a parliamentary veto of a no-deal Brexit.
The dinner will start at 18:30 local Brussels time and only last about 90 minutes… which is barely time for Juncker and Barnier to get on to the second bottle.
via http://ift.tt/2yrwfkg Tyler Durden