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Of: TT
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Brexit supporters celebrated “Brexit Pleasant Day” on January 31, 2020, when Britain formally left the EU. Stock photo.
Autumn is here, and then Brexit storms again.
Even if the UK has formally left the EU, there is still a risk of a collapse without a contract when the transition period expires.
Only a little over three months remain until January 1, 2021. By then, the UK will have completely disconnected from the EU and will no longer be covered by the transitional rules agreed by the parties to make things easier for businesses and citizens.
Instead, the new agreements will regulate everything from trucking to fishing to police cooperation.
Although such a thing does not exist yet.
And time is ticking.
– The situation is tense. Now there is enormous time pressure, says Foreign Trade Minister Anna Hallberg (S).
British deadline
Since March, negotiations between the EU and the UK have been ongoing, without decisive progress. Rather, the tone has gotten harder and harder lately.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has immediately announced that if there is no progress by October 15, he is ready to dispense with the deep free trade agreement that both sides were aiming for.
“In that case, we will have a trade agreement with the EU like the one Australia has. And I want to make it very clear that, as we said from the beginning, it will be a good solution for Britain,” Johnson said in a statement a couple of weeks ago. . then.
Kökaos
However, far from everyone agrees that such a solution is particularly good. The risk is obvious for chaos in all types of airports and in the tunnel under the English Channel when trucks suddenly have to be cleared and searched.
Fishing is another area of conflict, where EU vessels will no longer have access to British waters, while the British will find it much more difficult to get the fish to their main market on the European continent.
At the same time, fishing is an extremely heavy symbolic problem in the UK, where the economy outweighs the principle of self-determination.
Bill
The UK has also added a bill that the EU side accuses of being there to circumvent the exit deal that the EU and UK finally struck last winter.
The British Government considers that the bill is necessary to ensure internal trade within the UK in the future. But London has also recognized that certain parts, including the possibility of deciding that all trade from Northern Ireland should take place without additional controls, constitute a violation of the exit agreement.
The EU and even many Brits are grinding their teeth. Johnson still has strong support among his party’s comrades in parliament. His accusations against the EU for “playing bad” in the negotiations have also been rejected by friends of Brexit and the British press.
Tactic?
However, so far, the EU remains relatively calm.
– There can also be a lot of negotiation tactics in this, which is difficult to get past. I am still optimistic. I note that both the EU and the UK want a deal, says Foreign Trade Minister Hallberg.
Unity remains strong among the 27 member states with strong support for chief negotiator Michel Barnier.
The next round of negotiations begins in the last week of September. Then it is necessary to move forward to, at least, clarify what you can still have time to agree on.
– I do not think that we can end in all areas with a broad and deep agreement, but we should probably try to find ways to move forward. I’d like to say between a 60-40 (percent chance) that there is some kind of trade deal in any case, says Anna Hallberg.
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