EU calls emergency Brexit summit to vote on UK withdrawal agreement as Northern Ireland minister quits
European Council president Donald Tusk set a date for an emergency Brexit summit today to discuss the UK and EU’s draft withdrawal agreement.
The meeting, scheduled for 9.30am on Sunday, 25 November, is expected to formalise the UK’s Brexit deal hammered out by Prime Minister Theresa May and EU negotiator Michel Barnier.
“Let me say to our British friends: as much as I am sad to see you leave, I will do everything to make this farewell the least painful possible, both for you and for us,” Tusk said.
If nothing extraordinary happens, we will hold a #EUCO to finalise and formalise the #Brexit agreement on Sunday 25 November at 9h30.
My press statement this morning with @MichelBarnier: https://t.co/bjFQA9omHb pic.twitter.com/FtIsc7odHL
— Charles Michel (@eucopresident) November 15, 2018
Politicians and business figures continued to react this morning to May’s Brexit deal, which received cabinet approval last night after a five-hour marathon meeting.
Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer confirmed Labour would vote against the deal, saying it fails the party’s tests for a good deal while branding it a “miserable failure of negotiation”.
Meanwhile, a minister for Northern Ireland, Shailesh Vara, informed Downing Street of his resignation this morning, saying the deal leaves the UK “in a half-way house with no time limit” on when it can fully leave.
He told the Prime Minister: “We will be locked in a customs arrangement indefinitely, bound by rules determined by the EU over which we have no say.
“Worse, we will not be able to leave the customs arrangement unilaterally if we wish to do so. Northern Ireland in the meantime will be subject to a different relationship with the EU from the rest of the UK.”
Gerard Lyons, chief economic strategist at Netwealth Investment, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the agreement wasn’t one that would benefit the UK.
"Whilst it has avoided the cliff edge, I think it's important we don't bury our heads in the sands here and view this as a 'good' deal – this is still disappointing,” he said.
"To make a success of Brexit, we've got to get three things right – our relationship with the EU, our position with the rest of the world, and our domestic economic and financial agenda.
"The biggest single problem with this divorce settlement is it ties our hands on two of those three areas – our ability to position ourselves globally, and our domestic economic agenda."
But others welcomed it, with CBI boss Carolyn Fairbairn calling it a retreat from the mass spending the government had planned to counteract the economic consequences of a no-deal departure.
“We know that millions and millions of pounds has been spent on contingency planning – if this agreement continues, the button can be unpressed," she told the Today programme.
"There's a world of opportunities out there for the UK, and now we can get beyond it. Most of the real opportunities we have are right here on our doorstep. This pulls us back from the cliff edge and we can move forward…but it's not the end of the road," Fairbairn added.
However, she said the deal was a route towards more permanent answers to gaining frictionless trade and access to EU services.