If Brexit goes wrong it would be a disaster, not just for the U.K., but for the whole of Europe, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Hunt renewed his government\u2019s demand for a \u201csimple but important change\u201d to the Brexit agreement at a news conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.<\/p>\n
“The current text uses the word \u2018temporary\u2019 to describe the backstop, so what we need to do is put some flesh on the bone of what temporary actually means,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Hunt argued that such a change to the contentious Irish backstop arrangements would help Prime Minister Theresa May\u2019s government to get the parliamentary support for the U.K.\u2019s withdrawal agreement.<\/p>\n
May suffered an overwhelming defeat over her Brexit deal last month, with a majority of lawmakers rejecting the draft EU withdrawal agreement, fearing backstop arrangements for the Irish border could force the U.K. to follow EU rules for an indefinite time.<\/p>\n
The EU insisted on the backstop arrangement to prevent a “hard border\u201d with EU member Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland, after the Brexit.<\/p>\n
According the draft agreement, if the EU and UK will not be able to finalize negotiations on their future relationship by Dec. 31 2020, backstop arrangements will apply, and Ireland and Northern Ireland will remain part of the same EU-U.K. customs territory.<\/p>\n
For his part, Maas highlighted that all EU members were for an orderly exit, and seeking ways to avoid a hard-Brexit.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody seems to be working hard to do so. But we seem to have not been able to find the right path. And the time is of the essence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI very much welcome the fact that the discussions are becoming more concrete,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The U.K. is set to leave the bloc end of March as a result of a 2016 referendum where voters decided to leave the union after more than 40 years of membership.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British foreign secretary says no-deal Brexit would be horrible for UK, Europe If Brexit goes wrong it would be a disaster, not just for the U.K., but for the whole of Europe, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Wednesday. Hunt renewed his government\u2019s demand for a \u201csimple but important change\u201d to the Brexit agreement at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":62504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,51,1,118,14],"tags":[77459,3220,7831],"class_list":["post-62503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-economy","category-general","category-hot","category-world","tag-brexit","tag-eu","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}