EU27: 10 – UK: 4

 Digital thinking  No Responses »
Jul 192017
 

According to reports of the Brexit negotiations, the second round of talks this week may be stopped ‘because the UK is not ready‘. Over a year after the EU Referendum result, we may wonder how that can be.

In the table below, I have summarised the negotiating position papers published by the European Commission and by the UK Government.

Strictly speaking, the White Papers and Terms of Reference are not formally part of the negotiations. However, the UK Government website includes them under the heading ‘position papers’, so I have included them in the table. I have also included the terms of reference, which appear on both websites, although they too are not position papers. The terms of reference set out the negotiation process, including dates of meetings.

International negotiations usually take place chapter-by-chapter. The discussions on different “chapters” usually involve the relevant experts for each chapter.

So far, as you can see from the table below, the Commission has published 10 position papers (in the strict sense) while the UK Government has published only 4. Most of the Commission’s position papers were also published in draft form when they were sent to the EU27  for comments two weeks earlier. Perhaps the UK Government’s problem has been that they also published the Repeal Bill on the same day as three of its position papers.

I have included direct links to both the EU27 and UK position papers in the table, together with their dates of publication. In a previous post, I had tried to compare the EU27 and UK positions on citizens’ rights. It was not easy because the structures of the EU27 and UK position papers are very different. Still, if anyone has the time to complete the exercise of matching the paragraphs of the UK position on citizens’ rights (in the second column) with the corresponding paragraphs of the EU27 position, here is the comparison table I had started.

As Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesperson Tom Brake observed after Brexit Minister David Davis left the talks after an hour to return to London and was pictured without any papers at the negotiating table, “This is a Government with no papers, no plan and no time for the most important negotiations of a lifetime.”

TopicDate published by
European Commission		Date published by
UK Government
Repeal Bill: White Paper15 May 2017
The United Kingdom’s exit from and new partnership with the European Union White Paper15 May 2017
Essential principles on the financial settlementDraft: 29 May 2017
Final: 12 June 2017
Essential principles on citizens' rightsDraft: 29 May 2017
Final: 12 June 2017		26 June 2017
Terms of reference for the Article 50 TEU negotiations19 June 201719 June 2017
Nuclear materials and safeguard equipment (Euratom)Draft: 23 June 2017
Final: 13 July 2017		13 July 2017
Ongoing Police and Judicial
Cooperation in Criminal matters		Draft: 29 June 2017
Final: 13 July 2017
Functioning of the Union Institutions, Agencies and BodiesDraft: 29 June 2017
Final: 13 July 2017		13 July 2017
GovernanceDraft: 29 June 2017
Final: 13 July 2017
Goods placed on the Market under Union law before the withdrawal dateDraft: 29 June 2017
Final: 13 July 2017
Ongoing Union Judicial and Administrative Procedures13 July 201713 July 2017
Judicial Cooperation in Civil and Commercial matters13 July 2017
Ongoing Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal matters13 July 2017

D-Day: Who will pick up the Brexit ball dropped by Theresa May?

 Digital thinking, Tagore  No Responses »
Jun 082017
 

On 6 June 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history began the liberation of German-occupied northwestern Europe from Nazi control and contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front. Just over 73 years later, courtesy of Theresa May triggering the Article 50 procedure to leave the EU and calling today’s General Election, Britain now finds itself looking over the precipice, away from most of its allies.

The official exit poll predicts a hung parliament: 314 seats for the Conservatives and a possible 314 seats for a ‘progressive alliance’ of Labour, SNP and Liberal Democrats. The Brexit negotiations are due to resume next Tuesday and the UK already lost 4 weeks’ preparation time due to the General Election. The deadline to complete the negotiations remains 29 March 2019.

If the exit poll is close to being correct, the Conservatives could lose 16 of the 330 seats they had won in 2015. This is rather more than the condition Theresa May had set for leaving Jeremy Corbyn (or rather, in practice, Keir Starmer) to lead the Brexit negotiations.

Of course, the exit poll after the UK Referendum on 23 June 2016 had predicted the opposite result to the Leave vote which emerged by the morning. Still, for now, this does not appear to be the resounding mandate Theresa May had called for to enter the negotiations with the EU27 for the UK to leave the EU.

Some thoughts from Tagore:

Man loses his true stature when he fails to unite fully with his fellows. A complete man is one who has this capacity for union, a lone individual is a fragmented being. We know that a child dreads ghosts only when he is alone. This is the lone person’s fear of his own weakness. Most of our fears are replicas of this fear of ghosts. — The Co-operative Principle, 1928.

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