The British government is so desperate to sign a Brexit deal with the European Union it will abandon yet another Brexit deadline tomorrow to allow talks to continue, according to claims.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had insisted on an October 15th cutoff for talks to reach a conclusive and positive point, believing that beyond that day there would not be time for European governments and the European Parliament to ratify the deal. But according to an unnamed source speaking to Bloomberg, the UK is now ready to abandon that deadline and continue talks.
The source told Bloomberg that “a deal is possible as long as both sides enter into a period of intense negotiation in the coming days”.
In the Euro-jargon parlance of these talks, that intense period of negotiations that would end in a deal being agreed is called “the tunnel”, so known because the negotiations would take place in an isolated and confined space away from media — and public — scrutiny. This would, the theory goes, prevent talks from being derailed and from attention being taken up by leaks to the press — a near-constant feature of negotiations so far otherwise.
While British negotiators want to enter tunnel talks to force progress, Europe’s chief negotiator — Michel Barnier — has repeatedly said any such move was a long way off, and sources said as recently as yesterday saying that the “tunnel… did not appear to be on the cards ‘by far'”.
The UK has set several deadlines and subsequently ignored them over the course of the Brexit negotiations, and may be suffering from the law of diminishing returns on this policy of talking tough and walking back at the last minute. Britain’s negotiators had said there was no point in talking if there was no “broad outline of an agreement” by June — four months ago — because at that point, it would be better to focus on making no-deal preparations rather than trying to sign a deal that would not be ready in time.
Despite that rhetoric, the deadline passed, and stalemate talks continued. And as Breitbart London reported this week, that was not by far the only missed deadline:
There were also three Brexit deadlines last year, with the original Brexit day moved from March 29th, 2019, to October 31st, 2019, after former Prime Minister Theresa May failed to pass her version of the withdrawal agreement. The then-Remainer dominated House of Commons forced the new prime minister, Boris Johnson, into another delay to January 31st, 2020.
Mr Johnson has maintained that he will not delay the transition period, and said in his telephone call with Mr Macron that while he wanted a deal, he would not accept one at any price and was ready to leave the bloc without one.
It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Europe’s Brexit supremo Michel Barnier felt empowered to dismiss this week’s Brexit deadline out of hand. As Breitbart London reported, he is claimed to have said of the deadline: “It is the third unilateral deadline that Johnson has imposed without agreement… We still have time.”
France, too, dismissed the October deadline, saying talks could go on into November. Speaking at the weekend, French minister Clément Beaune said to avoid “bad concessions” for the European Union being made, it was important to remain “calm” in the last days of negotiations. German political leaders, too, have pushed that talks must be advantageous to Europe — at the expense of the UK, if necessary.
Making no indication whatsoever that Europe would be willing to find compromise, Germany’s Europe minister said negotiators expected “substantial progress by our friends in the United Kingdom in key areas”.
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