‘Brexit no-deal outcome more likely than not’

Bloomberg

The Brexit negotiations are more likely to end in failure than in success, UK International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said, adding to a growing sense that Britain is heading for a messy divorce from the European Union.
There’s a 60 percent likelihood of a no-deal outcome, Fox told the Sunday Times in an interview. He blamed the European Commission for a lack of flexibility in fraught talks for
16 months. Prime Minister Theresa May hopes to conclude a divorce deal and the broad outline of a future trade agreement by October, giving the
UK and European parliaments until Britain’s scheduled departure in March to debate and vote on the package.
“The intransigence of the commission is pushing us towards no deal,” Fox told the paper. “We have set out the basis in which a deal can ­happen but if the EU decides that the theological obsession of the unelected is to take priority over the economic wellbeing of the ­people of Europe then it’s a bureaucrats’ Brexit — not a ­people’s Brexit,” and “there is only going to be one outcome.”
The UK government has ratcheted up pressure on the EU in recent weeks, urging the bloc to loosen its red lines and come to an accommodation over Brexit. Part of the UK strategy involves giving greater visibility for no-deal planning. May has said Britain will publish some 70 technical notes in August and September to lay out domestic plans for coping with a scenario without an accord, while Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt warned last week ahead of visits to Paris and Vienna that “we potentially face the prospect of a no-deal by accident.”
“It’s essential that ‘no deal’ looks credible to the EU,” Fox said. “If our message on ‘no deal’ is becoming more credible and resonating with those we are negotiating with in Europe, then our negotiating hand is getting stronger every day and we shouldn’t do anything to undermine that.” Hunt warned that leaving without an agreement would lead to lost jobs in Europe, while Fox on Sunday said that EU leaders must decide whether they want to protect jobs, trade and profit, or “the purity of the EU’s ideology.”
May cut her holiday short for a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. After she finally united her cabinet last month around a plan for the post-Brexit economic partnership with the EU, Europe’s lead negotiator, Michel Barnier, pushed back against its centerpiece — a plan for Britain to collect tariffs at EU rates at its borders in order to maintain a “frictionless” boundary with the bloc. That’s left May with little room to maneuver because Brexiteers in her party already say the strategy offers too many concessions to the bloc. Former Brexit Minister David Jones used an article in the Sun on Sunday to condemn May’s plan, enshrined in a so-called White Paper, as “Brexit in Name Only,” or Brino.
The aim of the establishment is “to ensure we have such a soft Brexit that it will be as if we had never left,” Jones wrote. “The government’s own Brexit White Paper makes clear that that is the desired outcome.”
Another detractor of May’s strategy, former International Development Secretary Priti Patel, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that the plan fails “by any reasonable standard” to reflect the result of the 2016 EU referendum or to “provide for our future economic prosperity.”
“Our negotiating advantages are meaningless without leadership brave enough for the task,” wrote Patel, often touted in the UK press as a potential challenger to May in any future leadership contest.
The vote for change represented by the result “takes political courage, the kind of courage that appears to have been lacking over the past two years.”
Britain should have one last attempt at negotiating a Canada-style free-trade deal with the EU, before accepting an exit on World Trade Organization terms, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, one of the architects of the Brexit campaign, said on Sunday in his LBC radio show. He said that wouldn’t represent “falling off a cliff-edge.”
“We voted for independence, not for a back-room deal done with Monsieur Barnier,” said Farage, a member of the European Parliament. He dismissed as “completely and utterly untrue” a Sunday Times report that he’ll seek election to the UK House of Commons if a court case against the lawmaker representing Peterborough triggers a special election.