London, Sep. 4 (PTI): The UK wants to “intensify” Brexit negotiations with the European Union rather than sticking to the current one-week-a-month meeting schedule, Downing Street said today.
Britain’s minister for exiting the EU David Davis has returned from Brussels after a round of talks last week that triggered an intense war of words between the two sides over the level of progress being made on the terms of the UK’s departure from the 28-member economic bloc.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s official spokesperson said the UK government was keen to hold a rolling set of meetings to make quicker progress and break the current deadlock.
“We are ready to intensify negotiations. Nothing has been formally agreed, but that is something that we can discuss.
Typically, in negotiations, as time goes on, you see the pace pick up,” she said.
The UK’s Department for Exiting the European Union has reportedly requested rolling talks to begin from September 18 and continue until a breakthrough is achieved.
At present, discussions are limited to week-long talks between Davis’ team and the EU team led by chief negotiator Michel Barnier every month.
With the date for Brexit set as March 2019 based on the two-year time-frame triggered with Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in March this year, the UK side is keen to move things along even as the EU side has claimed the process has been extremely slow-moving.
The EU wants “sufficient progress” in key “separation areas” in time for a European Council summit in October for negotiations to move onto the subject of the future UK-EU relationship.
The so-called “divorce” and the costs involved with it have been the subject of maximum disagreement on both sides.
Davis was forced to dismiss newspaper reports over the weekend that the UK had secretly agreed to pay an “exit” figure of up to 50 billion pounds as “nonsense”.
“It’s nonsense. The story is completely wrong,” he said, accusing the EU of using the tight Brexit timetable to almost bully the UK into agreeing to a figure.
“They have set this up to try and create pressure on us on money. That’s what it is about. They are trying to play time against money. That’s exactly what they are doing,” Davis said.
May’s spokesperson also indicated that the UK would not come up with a figure until wider talks began, saying, “We are not there yet”.
But she agreed that the divorce bill was “inextricably linked” to the UK’s future relationship with the EU.
British MPs will return to Parliament tomorrow after their summer break and begin preparations to debate the government’s flagship Brexit bill from Thursday.
The EU Withdrawal Bill will repeal the law that paved the way for the UK to join the European Economic Community in the 1970s and copy-paste EU statutes into UK law.
The government has called for unity to get the bill through the House of Commons.
Opposition Labour party, which recently positioned itself as the party in favour of a soft Brexit that would keep the UK in the EU single market, said it will seek to amend the bill to stop the government from automatically accruing new powers after Brexit.
“We voted for the implementation of Article 50 because we respect the referendum result,” said Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell.
“But we cannot have this situation where government becomes unaccountable on the implementation of one of the most important decisions for a generation,” McDonnell said.
