UK should give up hope of Brexit trade deal with EU, Tory grandees tell May - Politics live

Leadsom says ministers taking their time over EU withdrawal bill out of 'respect' to Commons

In response to Valerie Vaz, Andrea Leadsom also defended the government’s decision to delay the EU withdrawal bill’s committee stage. There were 300 amendments and 54 new clauses that have been tabled to consider, she said. She said it should be “reassuring” to MPs that the government was looking at them carefully before bringing the legislation back to the Commons.

It should be reassuring to the House to know that government is looking very carefully at those amendments and new clauses, to ensure when it does come back to this chamber for its response and for the debate in this chamber - where we have eight days of debate with eight protected hours on each day - that the responses will be well thought through.
But I’d like to point out to members across the House who may not be aware of this is there’s nothing odd at all about a pause between second reading and committee of the whole House ..
It is with our clear intent, our stated intent to show respect to this House by coming back to it with clear, considered responses to all of those proposals made by honourable members across the House.

She also said there was nothing odd about having a lengthy gap between second reading and committee stage for a bill of this kind. She said that there was a six-week gap between second reading and committee stage for the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and a 10-week gap for the Human Rights Act.
Leadsom did not address the point that the EU withdrawal bill is different, because ministers are under pressure get it through parliament fairly quickly to provide businesses with some certainty ahead of Brexit.
And, while her claim that ministers are looking at the amendments to the bill “very carefully”, is undoubtedly true, it is not principally a matter of showing “respect” to the Commons. Ministers are taking their time because they are worried about being defeated on key issues.

Leadsom confirms that ministers won't be bound by Commons vote to pause universal credit rollout

Last month, after the government abstained in two opposition day debates, government sources said this tactic would become the norm for the rest of the parliament. Motions passed after opposition day debates are not binding anyway and, without a majority, the Tory whips cannot be confident of winning. So they have decided they would rather not take part than run the risk of losing these votes narrowly.
The following day at business questions, when a Labour MP suggested that boycotting opposition debates was an abuse of process, Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the Commons, said MPs should not believe everything they read on Twitter. She implied that the news reports about what the government was going to do were wrong.
It is now clear that Leadsom’s quasi-denial was misleading. Last night, when the government abstained on the universal credit vote, the Tories effectively confirmed that staying away was their strategy for dealing with opposition day debates. Their tactics generated a big row. (Read the points of order here, at the bottom of the page.)
Valerie Vaz, the shadow leader of the Commons, has just challenged Leadsom over this in the Commons. Leadsom responded by claiming that the government was not going to ignore last night’s vote. She said:

The government is listening, and has been listening ... I do want to assure colleagues that this House is absolutely being listened to.

Leadsom said ministers were responding to concerns raised by MPs about universal credit.
But last night’s motion, passed by a majority of 299, said the universal credit rollout should be paused. Ministers are not going to accept this, and Leadsom told MPs just now that the government is not bound by motions passed after opposition day debates.

Leadsom confirms EU withdrawal bill still being delayed

Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the Commons, has just announced the business for next week in the Commons. As expected, the EU withdrawal bill didn’t feature. The government still has not announced when it will return to the Commons to start its committee stage.

David Davis backs away from claim that prospect of UK paying €50bn to EU is 'nonsense'

David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has given an interesting interview to various European newspapers. They included Die Welt, who conveniently have posted a transcript in English. Here are the key points.

• Davis backed away from a claim he made in September about the prospect of Britain paying €50bn to the EU being “nonsense”. When asked if that was still his view, he said:

Look, this is a negotiation and we want to resolve this in a way which meets our international obligations. I used that phrase because we don’t think that the legal argument stands up so we do it a different way. But it’s a negotiation and we’re going through the process at the moment of assessing, do the technical work on the commitments. We’ll then make a political judgement on what we think is realistic and sensible. But that’s a judgement that should be informed by everything, informed by the whole deal, not informed by a figure picked out of the air.

Davis used the phrase “nonsense” on the Andrew Marr Show on 3 September when asked about a story in the Sunday Times that day (paywall) saying:

Theresa May is set to approve a politically explosive Brexit bill of up to £50bn after the Conservative party conference in October in an effort to kickstart trade talks with the European Union.
Under plans being drawn up in Whitehall, Britain would pay between £7bn and £17bn a year to Brussels for three years after Brexit before ending sizeable direct payments into EU coffers in time for the 2022 general election.

Davis told Marr: “It’s nonsense. The story is completely wrong.”
Speaking to Die Welt, Davis seemed to be saying that the UK still does not think it legally owes the EU €50bn, but that it might make a payment going beyond its legal minimum obligation. He has already said that the UK will meet its “moral” obligations to the EU as well as its legal ones. He has also said the final decision over what to pay will be a political one, and not just a strict legal one.
Peter Foster, the Telegraph’s Europe editor, reads Davis’s comment to Die Welt as an admission that the deadlock over money is in London, not Brussels.

• Davis hinted that the UK may offer a new concession to the EU on the rights of EU nationals. He implied this could involve EU nationals continuing to have certain rights in relation to third-country spouses that UK citizens do not have for a period after Brexit. He said:

Let me deal with family rights, which is most difficult first. The issue is that in order to give perpetuity on family rights it would give to three million people in the UK rights that British citizens themselves don’t have. I am trying to think of a way of maybe a short-term way of sorting this, a certain window whatever.

Davis was referring to the way the current system means that Britons who want to bring a non-European spouse to the UK face tougher restrictions (a minimum income rule) than EU nationals living in the UK. The EU argues that closing this loophole will amount to a reduction in the rights of EU nationals. Asked whether this “window” might last five or 10 years, Davis said he was thinking of something “a bit shorter than that”.

• He claimed he was not accusing the EU of delaying the talks. Asked if he thought EU leaders were holding things up so that businesses relocated to the continent, he replied:

I’m not sure I’d take the view there’s a deliberate slowing of the process. I wouldn’t subscribe to that.

This is not quite what he told MPs on Tuesday, when he accused the EU of holding up the talks in the hope of trying to get the UK to pay more.

• He rejected claims that the government was divided over Brexit. Theresa May’s Florence speech was agreed “unanimously” by cabinet, he said, and he said Brexit involved “the most detailed set of policies I have had to deal with as a minister”. But there still arguments, he accepted.

On the substantive issues, there is unanimity. Of course, there is debate. This is a live democracy, and this is a debate about what is the best way to do things, and I do debate with myself sometimes what the best thing is.

• He said the prospect of the UK leaving the EU without a deal was not a probability, but a “very distant possibility”.

• He said Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, wants to loosen his negotiating mandate. Ministers have said as much before (see, for example, Philip Hammond here), but Davis suggested he has been told this by Barnier himself. He said:

What we know from discussions with Michel Barnier is that he is looking for a bit more leeway in his mandate. He has had a pretty tight mandate so far. We would also like him to be able to talk about the transition period, or implementation period as we call it.

Owen Paterson, the Conservative former environment secretary and one of the signatories of the Leave Means Leave ‘Let’s default to WTO’ open letter (see 9.18am), was on the Today programme talking about it. He said that the UK should not be “terrified” of leaving the European Union without a deal and that trading on WTO (World Trade Organisation) terms would be acceptable.
He said it was “inevitable at the moment, it is an ineluctable certainty we are going to end up with WTO at the end of this anyway” so it was better to “state that now” and give business time to prepare.
He also rejected concerns that the lack of a trade deal could lead to queues at ports, claiming that only 2% of shipments were checked by customs, with nearly all trade done electronically.
 Responding to his interview on Twitter, the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, a pro-European, accused Paterson of being “defeatist” and said leaving the EU without a trade deal would be “absurd”.

A German parliamentarian close to the chancellor, Angela Merkel, has confirmed that the European Union wants the UK to agree to pay up to €100bn (£89.4bn) to settle the Brexit divorce bill.
Michael Fuchs, vice chair of the of Merkel’s CDU/CSU group in the German parliament, said the €20bn (£17.9bn) so far offered by the UK was inadequate. Asked by ITV’s Good Morning Britain how much the EU was demanding, Fuchs said:

I cannot give you the final figure, but there is a figure of between €100bn and maybe €60bn [£53.7bn]. Something in between these two numbers should be the right point. This is what the negotiations have to do at moment. I hope David Davis is coming up with decent proposals, €20bn is definitely not enough.

Fuchs also confirmed that money was the major sticking point in the stalled negotiations. He said:

There is an offer of €20bn which is obviously not enough. You can just calculate all the pensions and it’s very obvious that the Europeans don’t want to pay the pensions for the Brits which are living in Brussels. So we have to find a solution on that topic first and then we go on with other topics.

But Fuchs described May’s letter to EU citizens living in the UK as a “positive” sign that she was considering the interest of Europeans in the UK.
Asked to respond to Fuchs comments about money, Brandon Lewis, the immigration minister, said:
We are in negotiations. We will honour our commitments - we have got a moral duty to do that but [we need] to work through exactly what it is to make sure what we are paying for is right for Great Britain, as much as it is right for the European partners.

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3h ago09:18

EU leaders are meeting in Brussels today for one of their regular summit. These events take place around half a dozen times a year, and often they are routine, but this one was supposed to authorise a Brexit talks breakthrough and, as a result, is attracting considerable scrutiny.
As well all know, we won’t get the breakthrough, because EU leaders will not decide that “sufficient progress” has been made in phase one of the talks (EU citizens’ rights, money and Ireland) to justify moving on to phase two (trade and the transition). But there is considerable interest anyway in what EU leaders say about the prospect a switch to phase two being agreed at the next summit in December.
I’ll be covering the opening of the summit, although the key developments are likely to come out out of my time - at the dinner tonight, where Theresa May will make the case for accelerating the talks, and tomorrow, when the EU27 deliver their assessment.
As the Guardian reports today, EU leaders feel the need to treat May with some caution because they don’t want to do anything that will leave her even weaker domestically, and hence unable to honour any Brexit commitments she made. And we saw a good example of the pressure she is facing at home overnight when the Leave Means Leave campaign issued an open letter signed by, among others, four former Tory cabinet ministers (Lord Lawson, Peter Lilley, John Redwood and Owen Paterson) saying May should prepare now to leave the EU with no trade deal because the EU is negotiating in bad faith. Here is an excerpt.

It has become increasingly clear that the European commission is deliberately deferring discussions on the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU27 post-Brexit. This is causing a highly damaging level of uncertainty for businesses which need time to make preparations for March 2019.
The EU is taking this approach because they do not believe that the UK would be prepared to go to WTO rules for our trading relationship with them. If at the European council this week, the EU continues to refuse to discuss the future framework for a trade relationship, we should formally declare that we are assuming that we will be subject to WTO rules from 30th March 2019. This would provide businesses with absolute certainty about the future and enable immediate steps to be taken to implement our independent trade policy.
If, early next year, the EU then decides to come back to discuss free trade, this will be a bonus - but it is not and should not be treated as essential.

In other EU developments:

• Jeremy Corbyn is in Brussels for meetings with Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and others.

• May has issued a direct appeal to EU citizens living in the UK saying that after Brexit they will be able to stay.

• Michael Fuchs, vice chair of Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU group in the German parliament, has told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the UK’s offer to pay the EU around €20bn when it leaves is inadequate and that it should pay between €100bn and maybe €60bn. I’ll post more on this soon.

• The Times (paywall) is reporting that Britain is “fighting a Brussels ‘rip-off’ that adds up to €7bn (£6.25bn) to the Brexit divorce bill by inflating the cost of pension liabilities for retired European Union officials.

Here is the agenda for the day. All times are UK times.
9.30am: Theresa May meets the former US president Bill Clinton in Downing Street to discuss Northern Ireland.
9.40am: Jeremy Corbyn is due to arrive in Brussels for his own Brexit talks. He is meeting Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Antonio Tajani, president of the European parliament, as well as the Italian, Swedish and Portuguese prime ministers.
10.30am: Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the Commons, takes business questions in the Commons. She will be asked about when the EU withdrawal bill will return to the Commons.
11am: Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, gives evidence to the Lords EU committee about Brexit.
11.30am: Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission, and Donald Tusk, president of the European council, hold a press conference ahead of the summit.
1pm: May arrives at the EU summit.
1pm: Damian Green, the first secretary of state, speaks at a press gallery lunch.
As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.