Michel Barnier has said that Britain could possibly begin negotiations on rejoining the European Union without being required to adopt the euro, but he insisted that the terms of any future relationship would be far more difficult to negotiate.
The former French prime minister, who led the EU’s Brexit negotiations and was long known as the bloc’s Mr Brexit, made the remarks to Sky News. His comments, delivered as pressure continued to build on Prime Minister’s questions over the UK’s post-Brexit arrangements, are likely to shape the debate over whether a return to the EU is more than a distant prospect.
Writing in comments that pointed to divisions within Conservative thinking, Mr Barnier said it was “perfectly possible to begin such a negotiation without any kind of obligation to take part in” the EU’s single currency. But he added that what remained “unnegotiable” was the condition attached to joining the single market.
That condition, he said, would require accepting freedom of movement for people as well as goods, services and capital.
“As far as the freedom of movement is concerned, I can only repeat that the four freedoms are linked together and are not negotiable,” Mr Barnier said.
The former minister also rejected the idea that the UK could selectively pick parts of the single market. “There is no negotiation possible… on any kind of cherry-picking or the single market ‘a la carte”, he added. “The UK knows quite perfectly the condition to be part of and to rejoin the single market and the customs union.”
What Barnier said about the euro and the single market
Mr Barnier’s intervention appeared designed to separate the symbolic and economic questions that have long complicated any talk of British re-entry into the EU.
On the euro, he suggested that currency membership was not an immediate precondition for opening talks. The former French premier instead focused on the single market, describing it as the
