Brexit Files Insight

‘High stress’ Brexit talks yield little progress

What the UK wants is ‘simply impossible’, says EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

This was the week when the Brexit negotiators began to sweat.

It was, according to U.K. Brexit Secretary David Davis, speaking at the closing press conference of the talks, “quite a high stress” time.

We are now three rounds of negotiations into the process, with just two more to go before the milestone European Council summit at which EU leaders will gather in Brussels in October.

As the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier has been at pains to point out, “time is flying.”

Barnier used his remarks at the press conference very deliberately to stoke that sense of urgency.

“With every passing day, we move closer to that date of departure,” that moment, he said with a flourish, that the U.K. leaves the EU “on the stroke of midnight” on March 29, 2019.

Barnier wants to turn the screw, and for obvious reasons. He made clear that as far as the EU is concerned, the fundamental British position has not moved far from where it was at the very start of this process, when EU leaders warned after the referendum that no “cherry-picking” would be allowed.

“The U.K. wants to take back control, it wants to adopt its own standards and regulations but it also wants to have these standards recognized automatically in the EU. That is what the U.K. papers ask for. This is simply impossible,” he said bluntly.

If the pressure is rising, so is the blood pressure. While Davis sought to portray a sense of bonhomie, smiling and joshing with Barnier in his trademark light-hearted style, some of the EU negotiator’s criticisms of the U.K. were far from good-humored.

On the Brexit bill, Barnier called on the U.K. to prove that it will meet not only its legal but its “moral” obligations to EU citizens — and citizens in third countries — waiting on development aid from Brussels, or loans from the EU. With the U.K. now beginning to elucidate its position, the two sides remain far, far apart on this key matter.

On citizens’ rights he chided the U.K. for the recent, erroneous Home Office delivery of letters warning of deportation to 100 EU citizens in the U.K. Something as basic as “trust,” he said, still needed to be built.

Incremental progress has been made in some less fundamental areas, but the takeaway from the week: Both sides are still talking past each other on the key issues.

This insight is from POLITICO‘s Brexit Files newsletter, a daily afternoon digest of the best coverage and analysis of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. Read today’s edition or subscribe here.