Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass. Go to InCompasshyph at

Europe.com for free access to all our podcast to date. This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation

with Professor Anand Menon. Annen is in his director of the UK in a changing Europe project.

Anand, I like this podcast to be about obviously the Brexit talks, but maybe as much from the UK side as the EU side.

It's very easy for people like me in the euro bubble to maybe think that the EU side has all the best answers and maybe the UK has

not. So this may be an opportunity for us to kind of test some of these thesis. So as you know,

we're recording this a few days before the next round of the Brexit talks, which has seemed

to be particularly crucial, the last round before joint assessment is made by E27, the UK about the state of progress so it is rather important and people

already maybe prematurely talking about stalemate and paralysis and no progress being

made so let's let's kick off first before the Brexit talks proper with a brief

comment if you wouldn't mind, on the state of play

in the joint committee discussion, the implementation of the withdrawal agreement, especially

with regards to the Northern Ireland Protocol. Is progress being made there? Well, the government,

as you know, put out a command paper poll last week, and I haven't seen an EU response to that yet, but it does seem to me that progress is being made. I mean, small steps. The British government has formally acknowledged the need for checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is considerable progress from what the Prime Minister has been insisting since before the election last year.

And the evidence is that the government is intending to implement.

The potential wrinkle is it's intending to implement based on its own reading of what the protocol says.

And judging from the command paper and what I've heard

from Brussels the British version of what the protocol means and the EU version are

going to be slightly different so small steps things are happening it will be wrong

to simply say oh nothing at all is going on but you know it's it's not going to

be easy and there will be fights along the way because irrespective what happens in the Brexit talks proper and assume this they will go

until the end of the year if there's a failure we end up with a no deal Brexit the

...