Downing Street briefings that the EU is ‘moving the goalposts’ for a free trade agreement and is belatedly demanding that the UK should not be compelled to maintain standards on state aid, competition, workers rights and environment seem either flaky or deliberately designed to once again cast Brussels as a duplicitous enemy.
If you look at the March 2018 EU Council guidelines (below) for the future relationship between the EU and the UK and the actually-agreed framework for the future relationship agreed in October 2019 (also below), the importance for the EU of maintaining a level playing field between the UK and EU is explicit.
The most important phrase in both documents is the stress on ‘economic interdependence and geographic proximity’.
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