Hello, I'm Paige and this is the Eurointelligence podcast covering current affairs in the

EU and Eurozone. I'm joined by Wolfgang and Susanna, directors of Eurointelligence here in Oxford.

Hi, guys. Back in Oxford. Okay, so you wanted to start by talking about Brexit today, yes?

Was that? I see you rolling your eyes. No one wants to talk about Brexit, but can you go over a little

bit of what happened this week and what we might be able to expect from Sunday onwards?

There are nominally negotiating now after this disastrous dinner on Wednesday.

There is not going to be any impetus in the negotiations

because neither team has been given any political mandate to actually cut a deal.

That was the purpose of this dinner.

It was never really realistic because Fondaline was not authorized to change the mandate

from the EU leaders, nor was she inclined to do so.

So there was really basically an exchange of views, another confrontation between two basically irreconcilable views.

I mean, what happened?

There were two things where the process went wrong, the UK's internal market bill, where they admitted to breach international law, caused a loss of confidence on the EU side. And on the UK side, they lost confidence when Barnier introduced this new replacement of what's used to be called the ratchet clause,

which is there where the ratchet clause was where regulation would align in a certain process that they had to go,

that the EU had proposed.

But since this was rejected by the UK, the EU has resorted to a proposal of unilateral sanctions. So if a UK, if a

divergence in regulation, say the EU of toughens labour laws and the UK doesn't, and the UK receives

a competitive advantage as a result of that, the EU could impose sanctions on the UK for simply not following the EU.

The UK has said that it cannot follow this absolutely. I can perfectly understand the UK's

position. There's no trade agreement in the world that has that. It's a complete innovation.

It's essentially a form of dynamic alignment by other means. The dynamic alignment was the ultimate sin of this trade negotiation because the EU came up with this idea and the UK has essentially taken the view that it doesn't even start negotiating for as long as this is on the table. And essentially, it was reintroduced at a later stage. Now, tragically,

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