BRUSSELS/LONDON, May 19 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Stumbling through video calls, the long-troubled Brexit talks are heading for a new crisis as coronavirus health restrictions bar the intense face-to-face meetings that have proven crucial in pulling the negotiations back from the brink.
With increasingly frustrated British and EU negotiators trading barbs over each other’s “ideological approach” and “lack of understanding” of the consequences of Britain’s departure from the bloc, talks on a new trade pact between the estranged allies have made virtually no progress in recent months.
Officials and diplomats on both sides forecast tensions will rise before a June 30 deadline, raising questions for companies over future trade between the world’s fifth-biggest economy and its biggest trading bloc which accounted for about 650 billion pounds a year before the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s difficult to make it as…we would like over video conference,” said a senior British official involved in the negotiations with the EU.
“If we can meet face-to-face at some point in the future, that will help, there is no doubt, it’s easier to establish understandings that way. No matter how well we know each other, it helps a lot.”
Such off-the-record, personal meetings have yielded breakthroughs in the stalled talks before, most notably when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, met for a countryside stroll last October.
Walking side-by-side down grassy paths in a rustic Elizabethan manor house near Liverpool, the two honed in private exchanges the makings of Britain’s divorce deal, which had been unattainable for their negotiators until that point.
On that basis, Britain left the EU the following January and the two sides now run the tightest of schedules to seal a new trade deal from 2021.
While face-to-face talks have proved crucial to finding breakthroughs in previous rounds, it is not clear whether having to rely on video conferences that bar the more personal contact will ultimately prove fatal to the process. Meetings in person have often been fraught and unproductive too.
The UK official joked that the lead negotiators could have a virtual drink together to help the talks along.
London says it wants a simple free trade agreement such as the EU has with Canada or Japan, which would mean significantly more trade frictions, while Brussels is arguing for a wider deal to take into account Britain’s proximity to the bloc.
