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Britain and Europe

Heading for disaster

9 July 2020

How Britain's Brexit collision course with the European Union will exacerbate the Covid crisis

Authors
Roger Liddle
Author
Editorial credit: photocosmos1 / Shutterstock.com

We need to talk about Brexit again. The negotiations on Britain’s future relationship with the EU are on a collision course for failure. To avoid this will require mutual give and take. Principally, the British government needs to climb down from its self-imagined pedestal of Brexit triumph.

In this new and urgent analysis for Policy Network, Labour peer Roger Liddle argues that the UK faces huge economic risks in piling on top of the grave Covid-19 emergency with the negative impacts of ‘no deal’, or a very ‘barebones’ trade deal, which is probably where we are heading. Equally, the success is imperilled of Britain’s future relationship with our European friends and allies beyond Brexit.

As former European adviser to the then British prime minister Tony Blair, and later advisor to the president of the European commission Jose Manuel Barroso, Liddle’s vast expertise alerts to the desperate need for a dramatic rethink. It has to start in London, in the office of Boris Johnson, the prime minister, now.

 

This paper is published in partnership with NEXTEUK

 

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