British minister says no trade deal for Brexit yet

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–This content was published on 23 December 2020 – 11:50
23 December 2020 – 11:50

By Guy Faulconbridge and Gabriela Baczynska

LONDON / BRUSSELS, Dec 23 (Reuters) – Britain and the European Union have yet to reach a Brexit trade deal that will avoid a turbulent separation within eight days due to deep differences in competition and fisheries, it said on Wednesday a British minister.

Since its formal exit from the EU on January 31, the UK has been negotiating a free trade deal with the bloc in an attempt to facilitate its exit from the single market and customs union later this year.

So far no agreement has been reached and both parties have launched an exhausting series of contradictory signals such as that the agreement is imminent, that the talks are still far from fruition or that a Brexit without a trade agreement cannot be ruled out.

“I remain reasonably optimistic, but there is no news to report to you this morning,” British Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told Sky News amid speculation in London that a deal could be announced on Wednesday.

“There are still the same serious areas of disagreement, whether in fisheries or fair competition,” he said. “But at the moment there is not enough progress. It is not an agreement that the prime minister thinks we can sign.”

Boris Johnson, struggling with an increasingly acute COVID-19 pandemic that has sparked a border crisis at Europe’s busiest trucking port, will decide whether the tight deal offered to him is worth signing. Failure to do so could win the applause of many Brexiters at home, but it would lead to serious business disruption.

Instead, a deal would ensure that trade in goods that makes up half of the annual trade between the EU and the UK, with a total value of almost $ 1 trillion, would remain free of tariffs and quotas.

The European Union needs at least four days to carry out the procedures that ensure that any pact is applied from January 1, said diplomatic sources of the bloc, which means that it is necessary to reach an agreement early next week to avoid commercial breakdowns.

(Information from Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton, Gabriela Baczynska and Michael Shields; edited in Spanish by Jose Elías Rodríguez and Javier Leira)

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