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Agencies

The UK has clinched a historic trade deal with the European Union, avoiding a bitter break-up and preparing the ground for a new relationship with its biggest commercial partner.
Negotiators finalised the accord to complete Britain’s separation from the bloc on Christmas Eve, just a week before the country leaves the EU’s single market and customs union.
The full text of the deal – expected to be thousands of pages long – was not immediately released.
Here’s what we know.
What changes on January 1?
Britain formally quit the European Union in January 2020 but has continued to observe all its rules during a transition period.
That halfway house ends at 2300 GMT on December 31. So from 2021, it will stand on its own, for better or worse.
A new trade deal, agreed Thursday, will smooth the path by lifting the prospect of tariffs and quotas for cross-Channel goods, from cars to lamb.
Without a deal, imports and exports would have faced serious disruption with the abrupt return of barriers that have not existed for decades.
There are fears that certain foodstuffs and medicines could run short. Britain got a glimpse of what that might look like when France shut its borders to freight in response to the discovery of a new variant of the coronavirus.
But even with a deal, the future won’t be seamless.
UK exporters will still need to file reams of new customs paperwork to prove their goods have authorisation to enter the EU’s single market.
Britain has urged business to be ready either way, but industry players say the government has failed to deliver vital IT systems and support staff in time, heightening the risk of chaos after January 1.

How will new relationship affect economic growth?
Economists agree that the deal is better for the British economy than a no-deal outcome, and will help it recover from the coronavirus recession, which is expected to have reduced economic output by around 12 per cent in 2020.
The impact is much smaller for the EU and other countries around the world, which would have mainly experienced some volatility in financial markets in case of no deal.
The EU accounts for around half of the UK’s exports, so avoiding tariffs will help many companies. Executives can start to implement investment decisions that they’d kept on hold over the past few years of Brexit uncertainty. Still, the deal with the EU does not incorporate the full scope of the services sector.
Since it accounts for around 80 per cent of the British economy, those businesses that rely heavily on business with the EU, such as banking and finance, face a murkier future. That’s particularly ominous for the UK’s huge banking sector.
Britain will struggle to recover from botched coronavirus response and Brexit
What is Global Britain?
Brexiteers argue the EU has held Britain back through onerous regulation and it can now embark on a buccaneering new mission to support free trade around the world – “God’s diplomacy”, according to a February speech by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
But if heaven was listening, it had other plans in mind: a month after Johnson’s speech, Britain was forced into national lockdown by the coronavirus pandemic.
If the world ever gets back to normality, the idea is that Britain will not shrink inward after Brexit but will look outwards, as far afield as a free-trade pact with Pacific Rim countries.
“Now Global Britain is back, it is time for the makers, the doers and the innovators to help us write our most exciting chapter yet,” International Trade Secretary Liz Truss declared in October, touting UK exports of everything from clotted cream to robots.
Truss has already signed a post-Brexit trade deal with Japan and Canada, Singapore and Switzerland, among others.
It is also eyeing a deal with India, and negotiating others with the United States, Australia and New Zealand – Britain’s partners in the “Five Eyes” collective of English-speaking intelligence powers.
Further deals in the pipeline will cover 80 per cent of overseas trade by 2022, according to the government, which has shaken up the Foreign Office to integrate aid and development into Britain’s diplomatic agenda.

What about at home?
Johnson’s pitch to voters in last December’s general election was to “get Brexit done” and focus both money and attention on parts of the country that have failed to benefit from London’s finance-driven growth.
That “levelling up” agenda to bring new investment such as high-speed rail to northern England has been sidetracked by the pandemic.
But the government insists its long-term goals remain in place and that membership dues sent to the EU will be better spent at home.
Some Brexiteers want a radical overhaul of Britain’s economic model, to turn the country into “Singapore on Thames” – a lightly regulated, lightly taxed rival to supposedly sclerotic Europe.
Yet the government stresses that any free-trade deals won’t sacrifice its “red lines”: the state-run National Health Service, food standards and UK farming.
All of those sacred cows could be carved up if the United States forces post-Brexit Britain to yield the same kind of concessions on trade that the world’s most powerful economy has negotiated elsewhere.
And Joe Biden’s election as US president could restrict Johnson’s plans to bind Northern Ireland into the post-January 1 UK internal market, free of EU influence.
Has Brexit met its portaloo? UK faces ‘lorry jam’ border pressures
How have Britons reacted?
After months of fraught negotiations, Britons welcomed Thursday’s “Christmas present” Brexit deal with relief and some scepticism.
David Ashby, a 62-year-old from the town of Boston on the east coast of England, called it “a nice Christmas present for the country”, saying it was good “just to get it all finished and tied up and done with”.
“I think it’s dragged on for too long now,” he added.
Andy Finch, who also lives in the Lincolnshire market town which voted by a higher margin than anywhere else in the UK to leave the EU, sounded a pessimistic note.
“I don’t think it was a good idea in the first place. I still don’t think it’s a good idea. But that’s where we are. And, well, we’ll just have to see,” Finch said.
In the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, which voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, Sharmila Hutchinson, a bank employee, said she hadn’t supported Brexit and was “gutted to not be part of Europe any more”.
“It does make me nervous to think how I’m going to visit the European cities and friends,” the 35-year-old said.
Agence France-Presse and Associated Press


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Brexit

Brexit deal done: what’s next for ‘Global Britain’?

A mural by British artist Banksy depicts a workman chipping away at one of the stars on a European Union (EU) themed flag. File photo: AFP

epa08893282 Freight trucks queue up at Dover Port in Dover, Britain, 19 December 2020. Britain and the EU continue to negotiate a post-Brexit trade deal as the current Brexit transition period will end on 31 December. EPA-EFE/ANDY RAIN

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen meet for a dinner during they will try to reach a breakthrough on a post-Brexit trade deal on Dec. 9, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. (Aaron Chown/WPA Pool/Getty Images/TNS)

After months of fraught negotiations, Britons welcomed Thursday’s ‘Christmas present’ Brexit deal with relief and some scepticism. Photo: AFP

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After nearly 50 years of integration with Europe, Britain starts an uncertain new chapter on January 1
The final 2,000-page trade agreement was not immediately released, but here’s what we know



After nearly 50 years of integration with Europe, Britain starts an uncertain new chapter on January 1.


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