Barnier: UK must offer concessions within two weeks to ensure Brexit progress – as it happened

• The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has set the British government a deadline of two weeks to give “vital” clarification on the financial commitments it is willing to honour.

• Lord Kerr, the former diplomat who drafted article 50 says the UK could opt to reverse Brexit up to the moment we leave, even if a date for the country’s departure fromEuropean Union were added to the withdrawal bill, as Theresa May plans.

• The first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, is facing growing calls to commit to an independent investigation into his handling of harassment allegations made against the sacked minister Carl Sargeant.

• Charlie Elphicke, the Conservative MP who was suspended by his party after serious accusations about his conduct, has criticised the party for its handling of the process, claiming he is still unaware of the nature of the allegations a week after they came to light.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

10 Nov 201709.22 EST

Lisa O'Carroll

The deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party has knocked back the EU’s suggestion that Northern Ireland remain in the customs union and the single market in order to achieve an invisible border with Ireland.

Nigel Dodds has told the BBC’s John Campbell in Belfast that the EU’s comment “display an unwillingness .. to engage in a meaningful fashion in relation to the border”.

His remarks come as Brexit secretary David Davis said “frank” discussions had been held with the EU on the border question in this weeks talks.

Davis’s remarks may be seen as an attempt to win recognition that the Northern Ireland border issue cannot be solved in the first of talks because it is linked to the final trading deal with the EU.

He said progress had been made on the common travel area but inferred that there was no sign of a solution on the border question.

“We’ve also had frank discussions about some of the big challenges around the border,” he said. “We remain firmly committed to avoid any physical infrastructure,” he added, reiterating previous promises that there would not be customs inspectors on the ground or watchtowers to police the border.

In August, the UK suggested it could achieve an invisible border with pre-clearance checks on either side and exemptions for small businesses.

However in the September talks the EU dismissed this solution and said it would not allow Northern Ireland to be used as a proxy for talks on the wider question of the future trading relationship between the EU and the bloc.

This week’s leaked document suggests that the EU is doing just that.

The leaked EU document on Ireland says it “seems essential for the UK to commit to ensuring that a hard border on the island of Ireland is avoided, including by ensuring no emergence of regulatory divergence from these rules of the internal market and the customs union.”

According to the BBC, today we are at the half way point between the EU referendum vote and the UK leaving the EU.

Here is a link to the full text of the speech that Lord Kerr gave earlier today saying article 50 could be reversed.

10 Nov 201709.06 EST

Libby Brooks

A woman who was sent “inappropriate” text messages by the Scottish government’s former children’s minister Mark McDonald says that apologies must be followed up by a wider change in attitudes.

McDonald resigned from the Holyrood cabinet at the weekend after apologising “unreservedly” for an unspecified number of messages which he said he believed to have been “merely humorous or attempting to be friendly, [but which] might have made others uncomfortable or led them to question my intentions”. He remains an SNP MSP.

Speaking to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said:

The bottom line in this is there’s no point in people coming forward if people don’t change. People have to change in the future. Apologies are all well and good but it if doesn’t change how people act ... That’s why people come forward. People don’t want this. I don’t want it.

Yesterday first minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon suggested that there are some people who consider McDonald’s behaviour, the details of which have not been made public, not serious enough to merit his resignation.

Sturgeon said: “Mark has reflected and taken responsiblity for behaviour that some others may well have thought was not serious enough to resign, but he’s done the right thing and taken responsibility.” She added: “He’s a good MSP and will continue to be so.”

10 Nov 201709.04 EST

Henry McDonald

The European Commission’s proposal that Northern Ireland could remain within the customs union has been bitterly criticised by unionists who want it would create a border between the region and the rest of the UK.

Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson also claimed today that such a move would breach the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

Nicholson said the EC’s suggestion, contained in leaked documents, contradicted the EU’s promise to protect the Good Friday peace deal.

He said that “Brussels should think again” if it thinks it can speak for Northern Ireland. He continued:

Economically, placing barriers to trade with Great Britain, and taking us out of the UK single market makes no sense whatsoever. Across all major sectors, our biggest single market for sales is the United Kingdom.

What the EU is proposing would risk immense damage to Northern Ireland’s interests and would make a mockery of the Belfast agreement it has pledged to protect. It is vital that the UK Government maintains a strong line on this.

The department for international development has been in the news much more than normal in recent days and, with impeccable timing, Prospect magazine has just published an excellent and very thorough long read about its record by Steve Bloomfield.

It includes comments from Clare Short, who was the department’s first secretary of state when Labour set it up, in which she reveals that she now has doubts about the validity of the 0.7% aid target (spending 0.7% of national income on aid). Jack Straw, the former Labour foreign secretary, also has his doubts. Here is the key passage.

While three of Patel’s predecessors—Short, Benn and Mitchell—told me they believed Dfid should remain independent, the once-consensual target is now deeply controversial. Even Short now has her doubts. “I am afraid that the department has lost capacity and that 0.7 has ended up being destructive. Money is useful if it is well spent, not in itself.” While she insists that the target remains a “good idea,” “the UK development community needs a serious debate about what has gone wrong and how to put it right. It would be great to keep 0.7 and refocus, but this may not be possible.”

Straw is another former believer. “I don’t think protected budgets are an aid to good government. Those departments don’t have to argue their corner and they get sloppy. It leads to officials in Dfid searching for projects to spend money. An awful lot of money goes to spend on jobs for middle-class whites.”

The article, which is well worth reading in full, also reveals quite how unpopular Priti Patel, who resigned as international development secretary on Wednesday, was with her officials. Here is another extract.

While the budget remains intact, Patel happily accelerated the process by which Dfid’s very role is being eroded: a quarter of all aid money is now spent by other government departments. Its junior ministers are now shared with the Foreign Office. Long-serving Dfid staff told me morale is the lowest it has ever been, in part due to the way Patel ran the department.

Tensions between Patel’s team and Dfid veterans were there from the off—they had not forgotten that she had once argued that Dfid should be abolished. She and her team knew “that 80 per cent of their officials don’t trust them,” said one member of the 80 per cent. One long-standing Dfid civil servant went further: “Priti is about Priti,” he said. “It’s all about becoming prime minister.” Nor, he says, did she appear to know much about her brief. “She seems to be incredibly stupid and offensive” ....

Patel seemed to delight in shaking the ground on which Dfid stood. Her speech at Conservative party conference was mocked in the media as a leadership bid, but aid experts inside the department were more worried by the content. One official told me he’d watched it “open-jawed.” Time and again she criticised “wasted aid,” saying the public were “right to be angry” and that she would be “ruthless in closing programmes.” Using the sort of language that often gets used to bash benefit claimants, Patel said she was “not here to endlessly hand out money.” When she did talk about Britain’s role in development she linked “our heroic armed forces and aid experts.” One senior NGO policy official sums up the alarm this provoked: “it’s dangerous for our people” to be associated with the military.

Here are the main points from the David Davis/Michel Barnier press conference.

• Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, said the EU will not let the Brexit talks progress to stage two, where the future trade relationship gets discussed, at the Brussels summit in December unless the UK offers more. He was primarily talking about the EU’s desire for the UK to confirm that it will pay more as it leaves than the €20bn that Theresa May has put on the table. (See 12.23pm.)

• Davis, the Brexit secretary, said the UK would not let Northern Ireland stay in the customs union or the single market. He was responding to reports of a leaked EU position paper that suggests Ireland is calling for Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union and the single market to avoid a hard border going up between the Republic and Northern Ireland. With the UK government determined to leave the customs union and the single market, the paper implies the solution could involve Northern Ireland having different customs rules from the rest of the UK. But Davis said that was unacceptable. He said:

We respect the European Union desire to protect the legal order of the single market and customs union.

But that cannot come at cost to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom.

As I have said before, we recognise the need for specific solutions for the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland.

But let me be clear.

This cannot amount to creating a new border inside our United Kingdom.

• Davis repeated the UK’s determination to “honour the [financial] commitments we have made during the period of our membership”. This is the formula used by Theresa May in her Florence speech. But he did not say anything new about what these commitments are. Dia Chakravarty, the Telegraph’s Brexit editor, thinks the government has not prepared voters for how expensive this will be.

• Barnier said the UK and the EU had to agree an “objective interpretation” of what May meant when she said the UK would honour its financial commitments. He said:

This is absolutely vital if we are to achieve sufficient progress in December. It is just a matter of settling accounts as in any separation.

• Barnier said there had to be “sincere and real progress” in the Brexit talks for them to be able to move on to phase two, the trade and transition phase, in December. The EU has always set “sufficient progress” as the threshold. Barnier repeated that formula today but at least twice he used “sincere and real” as qualifiers to explain what “sufficient” meant. He said:

Only sufficient progress - that is to say sincere and real progress - on the three main key issues of these negotiations will enable the triggering of the of second phase of our negotiation.

• Barnier said the EU was not asking for concessions, and not planning to offer any itself. “We are not asking the UK for concessions, nor are we planning to make any concessions ourselves,” he said. He said the negotiation was just a matter of clarifying what was owed. (But he was ignoring the fact that any offer by the UK to pay more than it has already agreed would be seen as a concession, regardless of Brexit semantics.)

• Barnier said there were still some issues holding up an agreement on citizens’ rights. He said:

There are still a number of points that need more work: family reunification; the right to export social security benefits; and the role of the European Court of justice in guaranteeing consistent application of case law in the UK and in the EU.

• Davis called for more “flexibility” and “imagination” in the negotiations. He said:

The United Kingdom will continue to engage and negotiate constructively as we have done since the start.

But we need to see flexibility, imagination and willingness to make progress on both sides if these negotiations are to succeed and we are able to realise our new deep and special partnership.

View image in fullscreen

And here is the full text of Michel Barnier’s opening remarks. (It’s the original text, in a mix of English and French.)

Here is the full text of David Davis’s comments are the start of the press conference.

Here is some comment from journalists on the press conference.

From Politico Europe’s Charlie Cooper

From the Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin

From ITV’s James Mates

From the Independent’s Jon Stone

From Politico Europe’s Quentin Aries

From the New York Times’ James Kanter

The Brexit department has tweeted some quotes from David Davis’s opening statement.