Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen agree to continue UK-EU trade talks - as it happened

The shadow business secretary, Ed Miliband, has said a no-deal Brexit would be “a disastrous outcome for the country”. He told the BBC:

What the government seems to be saying is we are willing to accept no deal, which would mean tariffs across the board, because of some future, theoretical threat maybe sometime in the future to have tariffs in relation to some products.

That makes no sense at all. That is like saying I’m worried that my roof is going to leak in five years’ time, so let’s bulldoze the house now.

I say no-deal is a disastrous outcome for the country, it is not a wonderful outcome and it is a disgrace frankly that Boris Johnson said it.

Asked if Labour would vote for a deal if it were achieved, Miliband said his party will “look at the detail”. Pushed further, he added: “We’ve said we’re minded to support it.”

After the pessimism of last night, there is broad agreement that a deal remains achievable.

Raab, the Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and the UK’s former ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers, all agree on the point. The latter has suggested that to reach it, the talks will likely need to be extended, while Ireland’s leader said he hoped discussions would keep going beyond today.

Raab has said achieving a free trade deal “ought to be doable” and has sought to put the ball in the EU’s court. He has told Sky News:

First of all, as you’d expect, I’m making the case that if the EU had followed through on its commitments we’d have a free trade deal. It ought to be doable.

The foreign secretary added that the UK government “do want to get a deal if it’s at all possible”. Asked if talks could continue into the new year if no agreement is found, the foreign secretary said he would not “speculate on hypotheticals”, adding:

The reality is for the EU, their point of pressure is now. After 1 January, the idea that they are somehow going to win concessions later that they can’t win now I think is for the birds.

Rogers told Sky News it was unlikely any agreement between both sides would be reached today, though he was hopeful one could be reached in time.

It’s a very different question as to whether we get it by the end of the year. I think it’s odds-against today, but I’m not sure the talks will break down today either. Most of these deadlines in Brexit over many years have carried on being broken and I suspect this might be the latest. But we will see.

Martin said the “capacity still exists” to reach a deal and he would view a failure to do so as an “appalling failure of statecraft” by both sides. He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show:

The level playing field area is one that has bedeviled the talks from the outset. In my view, with some degree of creativity, a resolution can be found in that area.

And he said he hoped a dialogue would continue after today.

Where the dialogue continues, that gives me hope.

The UK needs a deal “as soon as possible”, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, Baroness Ruby McGregor-Smith, has said. She has told Sky News:

We need to understand how we are going to trade and what the rules are. I think it’s very difficult to be ready because there are a number of areas where we don’t have any detail at all. We don’t understand anything around quota tariffs or quotas. We don’t understand anything in detail about rules of origin.

We don’t have any tariff codes, we don’t know the detail of the Northern Ireland protocol and, if we do get a deal, we still don’t know what the UK structural fund is going to look like that’s going to support the more challenged areas of the UK.

We found with the pandemic what mattered was the detail of whatever has been agreed on government support and this is exactly going to be the same.

The shadow communities secretary, Steve Reed, has said the British people “cannot tolerate” a no-deal Brexit. He told Sky News:

The last thing we need is no-deal in these circumstances. It is one year and one day exactly since Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons promising to get Brexit done with an oven-ready Brexit deal that he had ready to agree with the European Union.

Now we are right at the 11th hour now aren’t we? The deal is not yet done, it needs to be got over the line because we cannot tolerate in this country the damage that a no-deal Brexit would do – and nor can we tolerate the uncertainty that a no-deal Brexit would do.

One of the reasons people voted to get Brexit done was they’ve had enough of four-and-a-half years of going round and round in circles over Brexit. They want this ended, they want confidence and security that we can move our country forwards.

A no-deal Brexit would simply mean the negotiations are restarted again next month, only Britain would be in a far weaker position. So Boris Johnson needs to now do what he told the country a year ago he was ready to do and get Brexit done.

González-Laya said she could not understand why fisheries had proved such a sticking point in the talks. The talks are reportedly stuck over a proposal from the EU for fishing rights in UK waters to continue unchanged for European trawlers for a decade. She told Sky News:

I just don’t understand why we cannot agree to agree on fishing. Fishing in the UK is 6,000 vessels employing 12,000 workers – that’s the magnitude of the problem, so I have difficulties understanding why we cannot agree to a landing zone on this.

Asked about the decision to deploy four Royal Navy boats to patrol UK waters in the event of no-deal, she added:

I think this is all for gallery, I don’t think this is serious and, by the way, I don’t think this is needed.

I think what would be more responsible is to sit down and agree what kind of relationship does the UK want with the European Union on fishing, again understanding that on this, like on the rest (of the issues), there are things for the UK to win, things for the EU to win – we just have to find this middle point.

A no-deal outcome should be avoided “at all costs”, Spain’s foreign minister, Arancha González-Laya, has said. She told Sky News:

No deal in the current circumstances would be extremely negative for our economies. And, if you go by what economists are saying – and there is plenty of literature on that, the UK would suffer even more than the European Union.

We both will suffer, more on the UK side, which I think is something we should try to avoid at all costs.

The foreign secretary claimed the UK has negotiated in good faith but the EU has “got to come to terms” with letting the UK gain independence.

We’ve gone into this with a spirit of pragmatism, of optimism, goodwill and what we’ve just found in the last analysis and at the last stage the EU has found letting go of its control over the UK very difficult – I think emotionally and politically if you like, they’ve got to come to terms with that.

Raab also warned that French fishing boats will have “zero access guaranteed” to the UK’s waters if there is no trade deal. Asked about navy ships patrolling the waters, he said:

The bottom line is, actually, if we do leave on WTO terms we’ll be an independent coastal state. Of course we’re going to enforce our waters around fisheries and whatever else.

And, of course, for the French and others that will mean – you know, forget those outlandish terms that they were asking of us – their fishing industries would have zero access guaranteed.

The UK has worked “very hard” at a technical level during the recent negotiations in Brussels, the Foreign Secretary has said, though he argued that there needs to be political “willing” to secure a Brexit trade deal. Dominic Raab has told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge On Sunday programme:

I called in to check in with our team in Brussels, they’ve worked incredibly hard.

You remember the PM has made clear we want to leave no stone unturned, so we’ve been at it very hard at the working technical level, with all the usual jousting of positions.

But what really matters is what the EU is willing at a political level to commit to.

There’s a conversation that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the (European) commission, will have with the prime minister later today - that’s when we’ll know.

But I think we need to be really clear there’s two fundamental issues at stake – the issue of fisheries and the issue of the so-called level playing field.

We want to be treated like any other independent self-respecting democracy. If the EU can accept that at a political level, then there’s every reason to be confident, but there is still I think a long way to go.