Hello and welcome to another Beyond Brexit podcast. I'm Emily Kahn. With recent developments

leaving many businesses feeling more uncertain than ever on the path ahead, the focus of today's

discussion will be on answering some of the questions we're hearing from clients and colleagues on

what it all means. I'm joined by Andrew Gray, our head of Brexit, Anna Wallace, Head of Political

Relations and Phil Brown, Senior Trade Advisor. I'm conscious you three have all been eating,

breathing and sleeping Brexit for the last few days. So thank you for taking the time out to come

and have a chat with me today. So, Anna, coming to you first, as we often do, so much seems to have moved since our last podcast.

Quickly take us through what's happened since the last update.

Well, it certainly has been a busy couple of weeks.

And we've crossed some important milestones in the Brexit journey, starting with the approval between the EU negotiators in the UK over the draft withdrawal agreement

and a short document outlining the framework for the future relationship.

That was then agreed by Cabinet.

And then that's, I guess, where it started to go slightly wrong with, I think, at the moment, about eight resignations.

But let's not get sort of caught up in the politics just yet. The timeline

after the cabinet approval now is the 25th of November. That's when there will be a special

summit in the EU where the council will sort of rubber stamp that agreement before the vote

in Parliament, the meaningful vote, which we expect will happen in early December. People

expect perhaps around the week commencing the 10th of December. And that's where things,

of course, get challenging. Most commentators at the moment expects that the UK government

will lose that vote at least the first time, some speculation that there might be a couple

of votes in Parliament

before the deal is approved.

...