EU Approves Tough Brexit Negotiating Stance, Demanding U.K. Pays

Monday, May 22 2017

The European Union finalized its tough Brexit negotiating position, reiterating its hard line on the U.K.’s departure bill and refusing to discuss a future trading arrangement until there is agreement on other key topics. “We want to move to a situation where all the commitments taken by the U.K. will be honored, as will ours with the U.K.,” Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, told reporters in Brussels on Monday after a meeting of the remaining 27 national governments. “We need to settle the accounts, and that’s a question of trust between us to build our future relationship.”

Speaking a day after U.K. Brexit Secretary David Davis was quoted in an interview as saying Britain would walk away from talks unless the bloc drops its high financial demands, Barnier said it would be wrong to see any collapse in the negotiations as a success. The size of Britain’s exit bill, which some estimates put as high as 100 billion euros ($112.4 billion) and is based on the U.K.’s past financial commitments to the EU, has been a source of debate for weeks and will prove an early test of the ability of both sides to find common ground when negotiations start. Even a 1 billion-pound ($1.3 billion) settlement would be “a lot of money,” Davis said in the interview published in the Sunday Times. “All 27 of us today have confirmed the position we’re going to defend,” Barnier said. “I do understand the U.K. has different positions, but as we’ve said, a negotiation is a negotiation.”

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