Brexit: Macron Says Talk of “No Deal” is Bluffing

Emmanuel Macron has slapped down David Davis and other hardline Brexiteers who claim that Britain is prepared for a “no deal” Brexit, insisting that “secondary actors” were trying to “bluff” their way to a better deal with “false information”.

The French President said Theresa May had never raised the prospect of a “no deal” Brexit during her meetings with other European leaders, pointedly adding that it is the Prime Minister who is in in charge of the British side of the Brexit negotiations.

Davis, the Brexit Secretary and lead negotiator for the UK, has begun to echo the claims of Brexit hardliners that Britain would be perfectly fine if it left the EU without a deal on future relations, a scenario that most analysts say would be disastrous.

With May caught in the middle between EU leaders who are demanding concessions on issues such as Britain’s “divorce bill” and hardliners in her own Cabinet and party who will make it hard for her to cede much ground the French president told a  press conference in Brussels that the “secondary players” should let may get on with it.

“There is one negotiator on the British side under the political authority of Theresa May. At no moment has Theresa May ever raised a ‘no deal’ as an option,” Macron said.

“If there are noises, bluff, false information by secondary actors or spectators to this discussion, that is … just life in these matters, or in the media,” Macron said. ”But in no case is it part of the discussions.”

“Secondary Actors”

Davis responded to Macron’s comments in a television interview by once again insisting that Britain was prepared to leave the EU without a new trade deal if the alternative was to accept a poor deal.

“We don’t want a ‘no deal,’ but if one comes, we’ll be ready for it,” Davis said.

Former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and MP Owen Paterson this week led a push by hardline Brexiteers demanding that May embrace the “no deal” option and walk away from the Brexit negotiations if the Brussels summit ended the way it eventually did, with no agreement yet to move on to trade issues.

While the correct protocol is for European leaders to avoid discussing the domestic political troubles of their fellow leaders, Macron said May’s current difficulties at home were caused by the fact that leading Brexiteers had consistently misled the public about the true implications of leaving the EU.

“The problem for Mrs May is that those who pleaded in favour of Brexit never explained to the British people what the consequences would be,” he said.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission expressed similar frustration with hardline Brexiteers and “superficial” UK newspapers.

“When some in the UK are pleading the cause of ‘no deal’ no one explains what that will mean,” he said. “We need a British way of carrying out collective education because nobody explained in detail to British people what Brexit meant.”

Show Us The Money

The 27 other EU leaders had earlier taken just 90 seconds to formally dash Britain’s hopes of moving the Brexit negotiations on to the issues of trade and a transition arrangement, instead agreeing that after five rounds of talks there had still not been enough progress on the “threshold” issues of the Irish border, the rights of expat citizens, and the divorce bill the UK would have to pay to cover the financial obligations it made as a member.

Macron said May’s offer to pay 20bn Euros during a two-year transition period was nowhere near what was required, as European officials said the final figure would need to be two or three times that size.

“I would say we are far from having reached the necessary financial commitments before we can open phase two (of the talks),” Macron said. “We are not halfway there.”

The one concession the EU leaders offered May was to say that they would begin discussing trade and transition issues among themselves, so that if Britain “makes more progress” on the divorce bill in the next two months negotiations on those issues might be authorised at their next summit on December 14.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel left no doubt that the only May could convince them to give the go-ahead in December would be to finally offer some details about how much Britain was prepared to pay.

Further progress “depends to a large extent” on Britain, Merkel said, and “the topic of financial commitments is the dominating issue in that regard.”

 

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