finance

Juncker tells UK to ‘get act together’ on Brexit


Jean-Claude Juncker has told the UK to “get your act together” before making demands on Brussels to amend a Brexit divorce agreement weeks before it is due to be voted on by the House of Commons. 

In a sign of the EU’s impatience with the UK government’s insistence that it can extract concessions from Brussels before the vote, the president of the European Commission said it was “entirely unreasonable for parts of the British public to believe that it is for the EU alone to propose a solution for all future British problems”. 

“My appeal is this: get your act together and then tell us what it is you want,” Mr Juncker told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. 

Theresa May is still hoping to extract concessions from the EU over backstop arrangements designed to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The government wants further assurances the backstop — which would create a UK-wide customs union with the EU — would never be used in practice to convince Eurosceptic Tory MEPs it is not a “trap” and to vote through the deal due to be held on the week beginning January 14. 

But EU27 leaders including Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron have repeated there will be no re-writing of a 585-page legally binding divorce agreement which lays out the backstop arrangements and has taken nearly two years to negotiate. 

Instead of concessions on the backstop like a one-year time limit as demanded by Mrs May, EU27 leaders at a testy summit earlier this month offered the prime minister only non-binding language saying if the backstop was ever in force it “would apply temporarily” until it was superseded by a UK-EU trade deal that would also prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. 

“Our proposed solutions have been on the table for months,” added Mr Juncker, who was confronted by Mrs May at the summit after calling the UK’s debate “nebulous and imprecise”. 

Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary, has said Brussels should give more clarity on how the temporary backstop will work ahead of the Commons vote. 

“The EU has agreed that the backstop is temporary and what we need them to do is define what temporary is,” Mr Hunt told the BBC’s Today programme earlier this week. “My view is this is not the time to be talking about what other major changes we might be faced with making because actually we can get this through.” 

There have been no formal EU-UK Brexit negotiations since the summit ended in acrimony on December 13, with EU diplomats on holiday over the Christmas and New Year break. Donald Tusk, European Council president, has also warned there is “no mandate to organise further negotiations”. 

To assuage Eurosceptic fears, Mr Juncker said Brussels was ready begin future relationship negotiations with the UK “the very next day” if the Commons backs the Brexit treaty.

“[We would] not wait until after the official withdrawal date of 29 March. I have the impression that the majority of British MPs deeply distrust both the EU and Mrs May,” said the commission president. 

“It is being insinuated that our aim is to keep the United Kingdom in the EU by all possible means. That is not our intention. All we want is clarity about our future relations. And we respect the result of the referendum.”



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