UK government confident of a deal on Brexit – civil servant

AMSTERDAM (ICIS)–The UK government remains confident that a deal will be reached on a future trading relationship with the EU, a senior civil servant said on Friday, despite current concern about the issue of the Irish border.

“We should be confident that a deal will be reached,” said Niall Mackenzie, director for infrastructure and materials at the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

“The main issue is the border… I think common sense will prevail on that, but I think it’s incumbent on both parties [to compromise],” he added.

Even in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a trading relationship agreed, the country is signed up to a raft of UN conventions that the EU is also a signatory to, Mackenzie said, and is working on copying across UK equivalents to EU legislation on a range of other legislative frameworks.

“We are not not going to have a mad deregulation… not much is going to change,” he said, speaking at Cefic’s general assembly in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Despite market unrest about sticking points in talks, with the UK pound sterling slumping last week after senior UK negotiators walked out of discussions with the European Commission around issues of ensuring frictionless trade across the Irish border, a deal is likely to be imminent, according to an academic.

“It is conceivable but not at all likely that there will be no deal,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs, King’s College London, also speaking at the event.

“The negotiating teams are very close, despite the froth we saw in London last week, and I am relatively confident there will be a sign-off on a deal in the next two weeks,” he added.

The Irish border has become the latest sticking point in negotiations, with the EU demanding further commitments on maintaining regulations in the Republic if a deal takes longer to be agreed, and the UK demurring on any arrangement that it does not have the power to terminate.

However, the uncertainty seen so far is a product of EU law, Menon added, as talks on a new trading relationship between the UK and EU cannot begin until the country has left the union.

“That uncertainty is coded in as the UK cannot negotiate a trade deal until after we leave under EU law,” he said, noting that uncertainty is likely to continue beyond the transition arrangement, and could last over half a decade from the country’s departure.

The Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium are likely to be hardest-hit by a no-deal Brexit, due to the closeness of their trading relationships with the country, but the impact will be noticeable for all member states, according to Carsten Brzeski, chief economist of banking group ING.

The average impact for member states is likely to amount to a 0.2 percentage point hit to annual GDP, he said.

Pictured: The border between the UK and Ireland, the last sticking point in Brexit negotiations
Source: Planet Observer/UIG/REX/Shutterstock