Brexit Talks Get Underway

The negotiations on the UK exiting the EU start today. Here’s the BBC:

Brexit Secretary David Davis will call for “a deal like no other in history” as he heads into talks with the EU.

Subjects for the negotiations, which officially start in Brussels later, include the status of expats, the UK’s “divorce bill” and the Northern Ireland border.

Mr Davis said there was a “long road ahead” but predicted a “deep and special partnership”.

The UK is set to leave the EU by the end of March 2019.

Day one of the negotiations will start at about 11:00 BST at European Commission buildings in Brussels.

Mr Davis and the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, a former French foreign minister and EU commissioner, will give a joint press conference at the end of the day. 

I’ve sensed some growing concerns about how well these talks might go, and the recent UK general election only made things worse. It’s not clear to me that the politicians who are in charge here can make this a success. Time will tell.

If you are looking for something positive related to Brexit, however, once the UK does leave the EU the personnel situation on the technical side of things is looking good. On Friday, the UK Department of International Trade announced that it had hired Crawford Falconer as the Chief Trade Negotiation Advisor. From the announcement: 

Together with his team Crawford will:

• develop and negotiate free trade agreements and market access deals with non-EU countries
• negotiate plurilateral trade deals on specific sectors or products
• make the department a ‘centre of excellence’ for negotiation and British trade
• support the UK’s membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Falconer is not a household name, but he is someone that I am very familiar with. I had just been reading his latest co-authored work. He was one of the judges (technically, a “panelist”) on a WTO dispute panel that ruled earlier this month on whether the U.S. has complied with a previous ruling related to the subsidies it provides to Boeing. He has also acted as a judge in 14 other GATT/WTO decisions.

Now, you may say, international adjudication is all well and good, but how about trade negotiations? Does he have any experience there? In fact, he does. He is a dual UK/New Zealand citizen and has been negotiating for New Zealand for many years. He was New Zealand’s Ambassador to the WTO in Geneva from 2005-2008 (and during that time, in his personal capacity, he chaired the Doha Round negotiations on agriculture and cotton). His LinkedIn page has more on his professional background.

There is still a long way to go before we get to the point of the UK negotiating free trade deals of its own. But once we do get there, its trade policy team is in pretty good hands.