UK & EU Agree To Give Brexit Talks One More Chance Despite “Serious Differences”

With Brexit talks on the brink of collapse, Boris Johnson and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s bureaucrat-in-chief, have agreed to to reconvene negotiations in Brussels.

Both teams of negotiators, who have been working all week to strike a deal in London to no avail, will travel to Brussels on Sunday. Talks will resume Monday evening.

The statement cautioned that “significant differences” remain between the two sides. Whether a resolution can be achieved is still unclear, but the two leaders believe that it’s worth giving talks another shot as the deadline for the UK to complete its departure from the EU’s single market and customs union as of Jan. 1.

Read the statement below:

“In a phone call today on the ongoing negotiations between the European Union and the United Kingdom, we welcomed the fact that progress has been achieved in many areas.”

“Nevertheless, significant differences remain on three critical issues: level playing field, governance and fisheries. Both sides underlined that no agreement is feasible if these issues are not resolved.”

“Whilst recognising the seriousness of these differences, we agreed that a further effort should be undertaken by our negotiating teams to assess whether they can be resolved.”

“We are therefore instructing our chief negotiators to reconvene tomorrow in Brussels.”

“We will speak again on Monday evening.”

For readers who haven’t been closely following the Brexit talks, let’s review what these three major “differences” entail: the two sides are still stuck on requirements to ensure a “level playing field” for British and European businesses, European access to British fisheries, and the issue of governance, which is really an issue of sovereignty. The EU wants to find a way to ensure that the UK’s policies on wages and workers rights, environmental standards, and other issues line up with the EU’s standards to prevent British businesses from undercutting their European counterparts.

Now that BoJo and EU Commission President von der Leyen have agreed to give “pinking” each sides’ red lines. These priorities will be passed down to the lead negotiators, who will continue trying to hash out a legal text that can be reviewed by MPs in Westminster and members of the European Council, a collection of leaders of the bloc’s member states.

Earlier in the day, word on the street was that fisheries access remained a tricky sticking point. The Telegraph reported earlier that the EU was pushing a “ridiculous” demand for 10 years of unfettered access to British waters.

An anonymous senior government source in London told the Telegraph the EU’s new offer was “frankly laughable.”

“They know we can’t possibly accept it. It’s ridiculous. If they think we will just cave in, they have made a massive miscalculation.”

The EU’s “laughable” proposal also included an offer to hand back just 18% of its fishing quotas when the UK had asked for 80%.

Amusingly, the biggest obstacle to a deal on fisheries is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been facing pressure from other EU leaders to relent. BoJo reportedly might call Macron Saturday to make a personal appeal to the French leader to relent.

The EU also reportedly insisted at the last minute that any deal must include a mechanism to slap punitive tariffs on UK goods if Britain diverges from EU regulations in the future (an example of the sovereignty and governance issues we mentioned above).

It was probably inevitable that political leaders from both sides would need to directly discuss the sticking points, since they’re technically the ones who set policy. But if another week passes without any progress, we suspect Brussels will revert to its plan to simply allow the UK to crash out, then wait for the economic and financial blowback to force the Tories back to the table.