On 15 December 2017, the European Council concluded that ‘sufficient progress’ had been reached in the negotiations on the UK withdrawal from the Union to start the second stage of the Brexit procedure. This second stage, scheduled to start this week, should establish a new relationship between the EU-27 and the UK as a third…

The European Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator Barnier recently stated that the ‘Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement’ (CETA) between the EU and Canada is the only feasible model left for Brexit. If this is so, it is bad news. Inevitably, a CETA-Brexit will be much closer to a hard Brexit than to the glorious bespoken deal…