Johnson’s Brexit faces delay amid virus risk

Bloomberg

Remember Brexit? Hundreds of trade negotiators from the UK and European Union were due to meet in London on Wednesday to hammer out a trade deal.
With those discussions now delayed because of the coronavirus, it’s increasingly likely Prime Minister Boris Johnson will have to postpone Britain’s final break with the bloc at the end of this year, something he has long refused to do.
That means asking the EU to extend the 11-month transition period Britain entered after leaving the bloc on January 31. In normal times, that would be an unacceptable choice for a prime minister who won an election promising to “get Brexit done.” During transition, Britain is still bound by rules set in Brussels, even if it has no say over them, and if it wants an extension, the UK will have to pay into the EU’s budget. But with the coronavirus soaking up time and resources, Johnson may have little choice.
Officially, the UK government is determined to press on and remains committed to the deadline. The two sides are still discussing ways to replace the planned face-to-face meetings with video conferences.

“This pandemic means that the case for an extension to the transition becomes much, much stronger,” Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London, told the UK Parliament’s Future Relationship with the EU Committee in London.

“It makes an already compressed timetable still more compressed.”

“Fully Committed”
“Both sides remain fully committed to the negotiations and we remain in regular contact with the European Commission to consider alternative ways to continue discussions,” the U.K. government said in a statement.
Privately, though, officials acknowledge that any substantial progress is highly unlikely. Concerns about confidentiality, the complication of having 11 different work streams, and the fact that there are more than 100 people in each team will make any work hard, officials said.
An additional difficulty is that while the negotiators on each side focus entirely on the talks, they will still need broader political guidance — from Johnson’s office in the U.K. and from representatives from the EU’s 27 governments on the European side. This will be difficult when so much energy is being used to defeat the pandemic, officials said.
“We have a very centralized approach,” with decisions on the EU negotiations all going through Johnson’s office, Menon told members of parliament. “Bandwidth is going to be an issue.”
Little Time
There are similar problems on the other side of the English Channel. National ambassadors to the EU have been telling the European Commission they will have little time to think about Brexit, or scrutinize the bloc’s latest draft of its version of the agreement, while their countries are at the epicenter of the outbreak, one official said.
This all means that, with only one round of the negotiations completed, Johnson is likely to be forced to delay Britain’s parting from the EU. He will need to make the formal request by the mid-year.
On Tuesday, though, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab reiterated Downing Street’s determination to press on, telling MPs how the government’s cooperation with Cuba over the coronavirus made “the case for intensive diplomacy to get this deal done and move on and take the relationship to the next level.”
Even if Johnson doesn’t want to extend the transition period, he may be forced to if industry is crippled by the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
Failure to get a deal when the transition period ends would see the return of tariffs and quotas on trade between the U.K. and EU and the introduction of more red tape for British companies and citizens working in or traveling to the bloc.
“Huge Shock”
“Even if the U.K. gets exactly what it wants in this agreement, this is going to be a huge shock to the U.K. economy,” Christophe Bondy, a partner at the London-based International Trade and Investment Law group of Steptoe & Johnson LLP, told the same parliamentary committee. “To impose a double shock at this time would be extremely challenging.”
If the U.K. doesn’t request an extension, a slimmed-down trade deal could still be possible if talks can resume after the summer. Several EU officials said that, politics aside, negotiators could draw up an agreement in a few weeks or even days. That is, they said, if Johnson wants a deal at all.