Welcome to F.T. Politics, a weekly discussion on what's happening in Westminster from the Financial Times.

I'm Sebastian Payne. This week we'll be discussing the

ongoing Brexit stalemate and the UK's total lack of progress in the talks with

Brussels, plus we'll be looking at the sudden rise in violent knife crime and digging into who is to blame.

I'm delighted to be joined by our Brussels Bureau Chief Alex Barker, columnist Robert Shrimsley,

Deputy opinion to Miranda Green and Social Policy Correspondent Robert Wright.

Thank you all for joining and if you like this episode of F.T. politics

then why not subscribe to receive it every Saturday morning or you could even leave us a nice review.

So what happened with Brexit this week?

Not a lot and that in itself is rather concerning.

With 20 days to go until the UK is set to leave the EU, there was no sign of any breakthrough in the talks

of Brussels about how to fiddle with that Irish border backstop to make it more palatable to

conservative MPs. So Mrs May is approaching another meaningful vote next Tuesday

with nothing to help her through. So Alex Barker if you can just begin by giving us a

bit of a sense of what's been going Brussels this week that talks have been ongoing between the UK

teams and the EU teams, Jeffrey Cox, the very boisterous attorney general, has been there to try and

get something, some kind of breakthrough, but he's been laying proposals that have

not gone down particularly well.

No, I mean, this was probably one of the worst weeks of negotiations we had in this whole process really. They were pretty

bad-tempered, they didn't make much progress, and the stakes are pretty high. We had a meeting, really the most important one yet,

between Jeffrey Cox, the UK's top lawyer,

attorney general, and Michelle Barnier,

...