May’s Brexit red lines prompt ‘warning’

Bloomberg

The European Commission fired a warning shot across Theresa May’s bow after her government decided to seek a tailor-made Brexit deal on its own terms, saying that the U.K. could not pick and choose the conditions it preferred.
The British premier earlier this week set out the first of her red lines for Brexit negotiations, saying she wanted to curtail the free movement of people coming to the U.K. from the European Union and suggesting she’s willing to leave the bloc’s single market to do so.
European Commission Vice
President Valdis Dombrovskis said in response in an interview Saturday with Bloomberg Television’s Flavia Rotondi at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy, that
conditions on free movement of goods, services, capital and labor were “a package and there cannot be cherry picking — you like free movement of capital but don’t like free movement of labor or the other way round.”

‘Strategic Decision’
Dombrovskis urged the U.K. to formally trigger negotiations on exiting the EU “without undue delay because it is important to provide some direction of the work and limit this period of uncertainty.” Britain has “a strategic decision to take, whether to stay inside the EU internal market or outside the internal market.”
Signaling lengthy talks ahead, Dombrovskis confirmed an initial two-year negotiating period could be prolonged, but only if there was the unanimous support of all EU states, including the U.K. In Stockholm, Sweden’s EU Minister Ann Linde said in an interview with Dagens Nyheter daily newspaper that at the end of the two years, the U.K. could be forced to leave the EU even if the two sides haven’t reached an agreement.
At the Cernobbio conference Yves Mersch, a European Central Bank Executive Board member, said earlier on Saturday that Brexit was triggering a debate not just on the EU’s future relationship with the U.K. but “also – and perhaps more importantly – on how to improve the functioning of the EU and of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as one of its key elements.”
Mersch said the poor quality of the public debate over the U.K.’s referendum had fueled populist movements. “The distortions and half-truths of the Brexit debate
has shown that, first, complexity, second, uncertainty about
pensions, third, low growth, and fourth, income distribution, offer fertile ground for extremists,”
Mersch said.

‘May must end Brexit uncertainty’

AFP

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May must act soon to prevent the uncertainty over Britain’s European Union departure from stoking greater economic anxiety, Belgium’s foreign minister said.
“The discussions need to start as quickly as possible because above all it’s uncertainty that’s the source of economic difficulties,” Didier Reynders told reporters Saturday on his way into a meeting with his 27 EU counterparts in Bratislava, Slovakia. “It’s obvious that Brexit will have an impact; at the moment as far as Belgium is concerned the impact has been fairly limited and I hope we will be able to keep it that way.”
While May has pledged that she won’t try to keep Britain in the EU against the wishes of the electorate, 10 weeks after the British referendum the government hasn’t decided what sort of relationship it wants with the rest of the bloc.
Two years of formal talks won’t start until May invokes Article 50 of the bloc’s Lisbon Treaty.