Britain will not seek to extend Brexit transition period, says minister

Penny Mordaunt tells MPs she hopes to have post-Brexit deal agreed by autumn.

The Guardian writes today that UK government will tell the EU on Friday it is not going to seek an extension to the Brexit transition period, the paymaster general, Penny Mordaunt, has said.

She told the House of Commons in an update on Brexit talks that she and Michael Gove would “emphasise that we will not be extending the transition period” when they meet EU counterparts at a Brexit joint committee meeting on Friday.

It led to an immediate accusation of the government behaving recklessly, with the Scottish National party MP Pete Wishart accusing the Conservatives of trying to “heap misery upon misery” with Covid-19 and Brexit “the twin horsemen of the economic apocalypse” denying any prospect of recovery.

Mordaunt insisted the country would not be “barrelling off a cliff edge” and hoped to have a deal by autumn. It said the government would be able to divert money from the EU coffers to to “level up” the British economy.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, pressed the government to honour the “oven-ready” deal Boris Johnson promised in his general election campaign.

She was speaking as the former environment secretary Theresa Villiers said the government would not succumb to EU demands to access British fishing waters.

“We are not going to see the compromises coming from Boris’s government,” Villiers said, arguing that the common fisheries policy (CFP) was “grossly unfair”.

Her comments came days after Brexit talks over a future trade deal hit the buffers with four major areas of disagreement, including access to British seas for EU boats.

“I just don’t see that the UK government is going to just shift in any substantive way from what is put on the table already,” Villiers told an Institute for Government webinar on Tuesday.

She said the government was “intensely conscious of how crucial fisheries are to the Scottish economy” and fishing communities and would defend them.

The impasse over sharing British fishing waters has thrown the prospects of a Brexit deal into disarray, with the UK and the EU calling for an acceleration of talks to try to break the logjam in July.

The UK has consistently said it will not extend the transition period, which ends in December.

Read the entire article here: Britain will not seek to extend Brexit transition period, says minister

Source: TheGuardian