[ad_1]
London:
Britain is ready for a brand new chapter Friday after securing a hard-fought post-Brexit commerce cope with the European Union as EU envoys awaited a briefing on an accord reached solely after months of tortuous negotiations.
The nation will no longer tumble off a commerce “cliff-edge” come January 1, avoiding a mountain of tariffs and quotas.
But main modifications are inevitable as Britain definitively quits the EU’s single market and free motion with the bloc involves an finish after almost half a century of integration.
Britain had been in a standstill transition interval nonetheless topic to the bloc’s guidelines since formally leaving the EU on January 31.
Standing in entrance of a Downing Street Christmas tree in a video message late Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vaunted the a whole lot of pages of textual content as “a “whole lot for the entire of Europe” and a “current” for Britain.
The address was “a victory speech,” Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank, told AFP.
“Boris Johnson was elected Prime minister to get Brexit completed, he has now definitively acquired Brexit completed,” Menon said.
Johnson has come under fierce criticism for his management of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, which has so far left almost 70,000 dead, the heaviest toll in Europe.
In recent days, thousands of trucks have been backed up at Channel ports after France and other European partners blocked crossings over rising cases of a new virus variant believed to spread faster.
Some pointed out that the transport chaos, which raised fears of shortages of fresh produce, could be a glimpse of what awaited the country if it crashed out of the EU single market without a deal.
Fishermen’s fears
The EU has offered Britain unprecedented tariff- and quota-free access to its single market of 450 million consumers.
But it has in return secured London’s commitment to respect its always-evolving rules in some areas such as environmental protection, labour regulation and tax, aiming to avoid Britain undercutting companies inside the bloc.
The UK has also signed up to guarantees that it will not abuse state aid to firms to seek an unfair advantage.
It was the question of fish that emerged as the last stumbling block this week when London pushed to reduce EU fishing fleets’ share of the estimated 650-million-euro (Euro 586 million, $790 million) annual haul by more than a third.
The final agreement settled on a 25-percent cut to be phased in over a five-and-a-half year period.
EU officials have promised to support their fishing sector through the painful cuts, a major downside of a deal European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen called “honest and balanced” overall.
With the agreement now shared with the bloc’s 27 member countries, their ambassadors will meet in Brussels on Christmas Day.
They are expected to take two or three days to analyse the agreement and decide whether to approve its provisional implementation.
‘Relief rather than celebration’
For Britain, “{that a} deal has been agreed in any respect is in lots of respects a outstanding achievement,” the Times newspaper judged.
Nevertheless, the final package is “a supply of aid moderately than celebration”, it added, with new restrictions including an end to free movement into the UK for European workers and into the EU for Britons.
Young people will be hit by Britain’s withdrawal from the continent-spanning Erasmus student exchange programme, to be replaced by a home-grown scheme named for pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing.
“The deal is hardly the top of the method. Now that (Johnson) has delivered on his promise to get Brexit completed, his problem is to make successful of it,” the Times warned.
The left-leaning Guardian was harsher, saying that “Johnson deserves no credit score for dodging a calamity that loomed so shut as a result of he drove so eagerly in the direction of it.”
In fact, the newspaper added, the deal “prescribes an instantaneous downgrade for the UK economic system”.
British MPs are set to debate the textual content of the settlement on Wednesday, however there’s little doubt will probably be accepted after the opposition Labour get together pledged its backing.
On the European facet, provisional approval by nationwide capitals have to be adopted by a vote within the European Parliament in early 2021.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[ad_2]
Source hyperlink