Brexit: Talks on trade deal to continue, UK and EU announce

Talks on a post-Brexit trade deal will continue, Boris Johnson has agreed with European Union chiefs.

The Prime Minister spoke to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to extend the deadline for negotiations to continue.

In a joint statement they agreed to “go the extra mile” in an effort to find a solution after almost a year of negotiations.

The statement said: “We had a useful phone call this morning. We discussed the major unresolved topics.

“Our negotiating teams have been working day and night over recent days.

“And, despite the exhaustion after almost a year of negotiations, despite the fact that deadlines have been missed over and over, we think it is responsible at this point to go the extra mile.

“We have accordingly mandated our negotiators to continue the talks and to see whether an agreement can even at this late stage be reached.”

Deadline

The agreement to carry on talking came despite pessimistic briefings from both sides of the negotiations in the run-up to the deadline set for Sunday on the future of the process.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab suggested there could be room for manoeuvre on the end point of the negotiations over a free trade agreement.

He said there is “a long way to go” to find a resolution on the two outstanding issues of fisheries and so-called level playing field “ratchet” clause which would tie the UK to future EU standards.

Mr Raab told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show the bar that would need to be crossed to continue talking is “quite high”, suggesting that some movement must have been achieved for Mr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen to reach that conclusion.

“We would need at a political level a commitment to move on those two key issues,” he said.

“When you look at what I said at the start of the week, it is pretty similar to what I’m saying now, which is never say never because EU negotiations can often drag and drift.

“But, actually, we do need finality and therefore we need at the political level of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, that there is clarity the EU will move on those two key issues. If we get that then there are still talks to be processed.”

The row over what rights EU trawlers would have to access UK waters dramatically escalated over the weekend, with Royal Navy vessels on stand-by to patrol the seas around Britain if there is no deal.

French President Emmanuel Macron is said to have threatened to veto a UK-EU trade deal after expressing dissatisfaction at the new quota terms being thrashed out for his fishermen.

Crazy

Mr Raab told Marr it is “crazy” of the French to make “aggressive demands” when a no-deal scenario would leave their boats with “zero assured access” to UK fishing grounds.

He said the UK is “going to exercise full control in the way I think people would expect over our fisheries” but said any enforcement would be “proportionate”.

But Spanish foreign minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya said she does not believe the proposition of deploying gunboats is “serious”.

She told the Sophy Ridge programme: “I think this is all for the gallery, I don’t think this is serious – and, by the way, I don’t think this is needed.

“I think what would be more responsible is to sit down and agree what kind of relationship does the UK want with the European Union on fishing, again understanding that on this, like on the rest (of the issues), there are things for the UK to win, things for the EU to win – we just have to find this middle point.”

A Labour spokesman said: “The Conservatives promised the British people that they had an oven-ready deal and that they would get Brexit done.

“The Government needs to deliver on that promise, get us the deal and allow us to move on as a country.”