Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

The key points of Lord Frost's letter to Michel Barnier

The emphasis is ours

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1. The EU “is insisting on additional, unbalanced, and unprecedented provisions in a range of areas, as a precondition for agreement”

• ”We are looking for a suite of agreements with a Free Trade Agreement at the core”
• ”Our draft FTA approximates very closely those the EU has agreed with Canada or Japan”
• ”Our draft fisheries agreement is very close to the EU / Norway Agreement”
• ”Our aviation proposals are similar to those the EU has agreed with other third countries”
• ”Our draft civil nuclear agreement is very close to similar cooperation agreements that Euratom (and indeed the UK) has concluded with other third countries”

2. “Overall, we find it hard to see what makes the UK, uniquely among your trading partners, so unworthy of being offered the kind of well-precedented arrangements commonplace in modern FTAs.”

• The EU not only insists on additional provisions, but is also not willing even to replicate provisions in previous FTAs
• No provision for mutual recognition of conformity assessment (which the EU agreed with or proposed to Canada, Australia, NZ, USA)
• No sector-specific provisions for key industries with particular technical barriers such as motor vehicles, medicinal products , organics and chemicals (agreed with or proposed to one or more of Canada, South Korea, Chile, USA)
• No equivalence mechanism for SPS measures (agreed with or proposed to Canada, Japan, NZ, Australia, Mexico)

On services:

• No provisions on regulatory cooperation for financial services, though the EU agreed this in the EU-Japan deal
• EU’s offer on lengths of stay for short-term business visitors is less generous than in the EU-Canada deal
• “Your team has told us that the EU's market access offer on services might be less than that tabled with Australia and New Zealand”

3. The Level Playing Field – “You must see that this is simply not a provision any democratic country could sign, since it would mean that the British people could not decide our own rules to support our own industries in our own Parliament.”

• “Our text sets out a comprehensive set of proposals designed specifically (as the Political Declaration puts it) to ‘prevent distortions of trade and unfair competitive advantages’”
• ”Our proposals are closely modelled on similar arrangements already agreed by the EU with similar countries, notably in the Canada FTA”
• EU Commissioner Hogan described the Canada provisions in March as “solid and anchored in a vast network of underlying international conventions and agreements", without finding it necessary to go beyond such standard “level playing field” provisions
• The EU’s text for the UK ”contains novel and unbalanced proposals which would bind this country to EU law or standards, and would prescribe the institutions which we would need to establish to deliver on these provisions”
• “Your text would require the UK simply to accept EU state aid rules; would enable the EU, and only the EU, to put tariffs on trade with the UK if we breached those rules; and would require us to accept an enforcement mechanism which gives a specific role to the European Court of Justice.”
• “You must see that this is simply not a provision any democratic country could sign, since it would mean that the British people could not decide our own rules to support our own industries in our own Parliament. Similar issues manifest themselves across labour, environment, climate change and taxation”
• “We cannot accept any alignment with EU rules, the appearance of EU law concepts, or commitments around internal monitoring and enforcement that are inappropriate for an FTA”

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The full text of Lord Frost’s letter to Michel Barnier can be found here. [PDF]