Brexit trade deal in sight, but haggle over fish grinds on

LONDON/BRUSSELS: Britain and the European Union were on the cusp of striking a narrow trade deal on Thursday, swerving away from a chaotic finale to a Brexit split that has shaken the 70-year project to forge European unity from the ruins of World War Two.

While a last-minute deal would avoid the most acrimonious ending to the divorce on Jan. 1, the United Kingdom is set for a much more distant relationship with its biggest trade partner than almost anyone expected at the time of the 2016 referendum.

Sources in London and Brussels said a deal was close – but possibly still some hours away – after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a late-night conference call with senior ministers, and negotiators in Brussels pored over reams of legal texts.

Johnson was expected to hold a news conference, just seven days before the UK turns its back on the EU’s single market and customs union at 2300 GMT on Dec. 31.

“Certainly the momentum and the expectation is that we will get a Christmas Eve Brexit deal and I can tell you that will be an enormous relief,” Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told RTE radio.

However, haggling over just how much fish such as sole, sand eels and herring EU boats should be able to catch in British waters was delaying the announcement of one of the most important trade deals in recent European history.

“There is some sort of last-minute hitch” related to “small text” of the fisheries agreement, Coveney said.

A UK source said the talks in Brussels could still have “some hours to run”, and an EU official agreed that wrangling over fishing rights could take several hours to work through.

News that a deal was imminent, first reported by Reuters on Wednesday, triggered a 1.5% surge in the pound against the dollar.

The UK formally left the EU on Jan. 31 but has since been in a transition period under which rules on trade, travel and business remained unchanged until the end of this year.

If the sides have struck a zero-tariff and zero-quota deal, it would help to smooth trade in goods that makes up half their $900 billion in annual commerce. It would also support the peace in Northern Ireland – a priority for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, who had warned Johnson that he must uphold the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

Even with an accord, some disruption is certain from Jan. 1 when Britain ends its often fraught 48-year relationship with a Franco-German-led project that sought to bind the ruined nations of post-World War Two Europe together into a global power.

After months of talks that were at times undermined by both COVID-19 and rhetoric from London and Paris, leaders across the EU’s 27 member states have cast an agreement as a way to avoid the nightmare of a “no-deal” exit.

But Europe’s second-largest economy will still be quitting both the EU’s single market of 450 million consumers, which late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher helped to create, and its customs union.