Disentangling Britain from the European Union could take six years, Philip Hammond said yesterday: two years to negotiate and a further four years to fully ratify.
The foreign secretary said: “Until we have served an Article 50 notice, we remain a full, participating member of the EU and our ability to negotiate new trade agreements is restricted by the continued application of EU law until we have negotiated our exit.”
He was speaking after Angela Merkel signalled that she would push for a business-as-usual approach to trade with the UK after Brexit. The German chancellor, who met Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, in Berlin yesterday, said that she wanted to ensure the impact of Brexit was “as small as possible” for the remaining 27 EU countries.
Mrs Merkel and Mr Kenny added to the pressure on Theresa May to give “clarity” on Britain’s post-EU strategy soon and set the formal process in motion to settle the new relationship between Britain and Europe. The pair will be Britain’s biggest allies in the EU in the months of hard bargaining that lie ahead, with both nations having close trade and travel relationships with the UK.
“Every member state has the same objective to make sure that our membership is not hard hit or too much affected by the decision taken by the citizens of the UK,” Mrs Merkel said. “This is why we are going to lead the negotiations together in the spirit that we want to keep the impact as small as possible for all of us. But it is difficult to give guarantees at this point in time: we do not even have any idea about the position of the UK.”
Her words may help to calm the fears of those who wanted to remain in the EU to avoid disrupting Britain’s trading relationship — although she does not speak for all EU nations. French politicians have taken a more hardline stance, suggesting that Britain’s trade relationship may suffer. The car industry is a powerful consideration for Mrs Merkel and she wants to avoid the worst-case scenario of 10 per cent tariffs being placed on cars if a preferential trade arrangement cannot be agreed. Germany sells more cars to Britain than to any other country, with 810,000 exported last year, while half of the 2.6 million cars sold in Britain last year were built by German-owned companies.
Mr Kenny sought Mrs Merkel’s help in keeping Ireland’s land border with the UK open after Brexit. He wanted the British government to trigger Article 50 as soon as possible. “What does Britain want, having made the decision to exit from the EU, and at what stage will a British prime minister trigger Article 50?” Mr Kenny said. “Would that be a prolonged period — which I would not favour — or would it be after a short time when the new prime minister would have assessed her strategy?”
Mrs May is under immediate pressure from France and the European Commission to trigger the exit clause before her stated deadline of the end of the year. Michel Sapin, the French finance minister, accused Britain of a “total lack of preparation” for a successful Brexit vote and a “lack of understanding of the mechanisms”.
“One of Europe’s problems is the slow process of this decision. They must be very concrete and advance more quickly,” he said at a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels. He warned that the new prime minister faced a “tough negotiation” on the terms of a British exit, as France steps up a campaign to end the City of London’s dominance of financial markets. “It could be a rough confrontation. We French will be one of the most demanding countries,” he added.
