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Coffee House Shots

At last: we have a Brexit deal

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.42.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A Brexit deal has been reached. Negotiations over fisheries continued into the early hours of Christmas Eve, and Boris Johnson finalised the agreement with Ursula von der Leyen at 1:44pm. The PM said the treaty resolves a 'question that has bedevilled politics for decades', while the EU Commission President said it was 'time to leave Brexit behind'. Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about the details.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

0:26.1

Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots and Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie

0:31.2

Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyfe. Finally, we have reached the day

0:36.6

when a Brexit deal has been agreed between the EU and the UK.

0:41.4

Both Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, have given

0:46.1

separate press conferences detailing and news, both heralding it as a great success for their

0:51.0

respective sides. Fraser, can you just talk us through the shape of the deal?

0:55.8

Obviously, it's a very long document that I don't think at the time recording anyone has yet had a

1:00.4

chance to go through. But what are the main takeaways from what's been agreed?

1:05.1

Well, there are apparently 500 pages plus an annex, which I will confess to not having read yet. But the basics of it

1:13.6

are pretty simple. It does seem to be Brexit. No single market, no free movement, no rule for the

1:19.8

European Court of Justice, no quotas and no tariffs. Our concession seems to have been on fish.

1:27.4

We're going to let EU boats keep

1:30.1

three out of every four fish they would have previously kept. We're giving them a five-year

1:34.2

transition, which is longer than the three years that we started with. And the other concession

1:40.3

perhaps is that we have agreed, it's not quite clear yet, but we've agreed that if we

1:45.3

diverge from EU rules, we will pay a price that will be tariffs slammed on what we sell, although

1:52.0

interestingly it will only be in the particular sector. So for example, if we are deemed to diverge

1:57.7

from EU rules in life sciences, we may pay a tariff or an extra charge on what

2:04.5

we export in life sciences, but we wouldn't pay an extra charge on, say, cars or anything like that.

2:10.4

So the power of retaliation is relatively limited. I personally had expected a far greater retaliatory regime than that. To be honest,

2:21.1

I had not expected them to be able to separate free trade from EU regulation. And that's what

...

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