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The big picture

After criticism at home and abroad that it has not thus far looked particularly prepared – or even united – for the Brexit talks, the government has confirmed it plans to publish a raft of new position papers next week.

The papers are thought likely to lay out the UK’s preferred options on key issues, including replacing the customs union with some kind of transitional agreement, avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and calculating Britain’s remaining financial obligations to Brussels.

They follow comments such as those this week by Sir Simon Fraser, a former head of the Foreign Office, who bluntly accused the government of being “a bit absent” from negotiations:



We haven’t put forward a lot because there are differences within the cabinet about the sort of Brexit we are heading for. So far we haven’t put much on the table … so we are a bit absent from the formal negotiation. We need to demonstrate that we are ready to engage on the substance.

The EU has demanded “sufficient progress” on the financial settlement and Irish border (plus citizens’ rights) before it will talk about the UK’s future relationship, but Britain believes the first two cannot be separated from the question of future customs arrangements and a final trade deal.

Downing Street also dismissed as “inaccurate speculation” a newspaper report that the government was prepared to offer a financial settlement of up to €40bn (£36bn) but only if the EU agreed to discuss it as part of a future relationship deal.

The so-called “divorce bill” is highly sensitive: campaigners promised a Brexit dividend of up to £350m a week. Prominent leavers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood and Nigel Farage say cash going the other way is unacceptable.



The view from Europe

Europe is mostly on holiday. However, Günther Oettinger, the EU’s budget commissioner, did weigh in on the financial settlement debate, telling Germany’s Bild newspaper that Britain was bound by previous commitments and would “therefore have to transfer funds to Brussels at least until 2020”.

The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, confidently told Bloomberg that Paris would catch up with and eventually beat Frankfurt to become the EU’s main financial centre after Britain leaves:

We will take the difficult decisions, we will lower French taxes, we will make our country more attractive. Many banks, many investors, should be aware that France is changing. We will win the race.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster

Theresa May’s recently fired chief of staff Nick Timothy told the Daily Telegraph the prime minister was not about to give in to some ministers’ calls for compromise on her Brexit red lines of controlling immigration, leaving the single market and ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice:

The fundamental things that the country voted for – I’m confident that those things will end. The intention of the government has been clear from the beginning: if you seek a partial relationship the danger is that you will be in the worst of all worlds, where you will be a rule-taker with none of the advantages of being in, but you will also sacrifice some of the advantages of being out.

Highlighting Labour’s divisions over Brexit, meanwhile, party MPs and trade unionists signed an open letter to leader Jeremy Corbyn asking him to commit to defending free movement when the UK leaves the EU.

And Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable said in an article for the Mail on Sunday that older, Eurosceptic Brexit voters happy to consider serious damage to the UK economy as a price worth paying to quit the EU had sold younger, more pro-European people out:

The martyrdom of the old comes cheap, since few have jobs to lose. They have comprehensively shafted the young. And the old have had the last word about Brexit, imposing a worldview coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe.

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Writing in the Observer, Nick Cohen says Britain faces a reckoning – yet the right continues to reward failure:

May took the referendum result as a licence for fanaticism. That is her responsibility alone. I don’t think Leave voters have begun to understand the consequences. May’s promise to bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European court of justice will tear up bilateral agreements governing everything from the regulation of nuclear industry to flights between Britain and the continent, while bringing chaos to British courts. If this government were serious, there would now be a frantic drive to establish new courts and arbitration panels to fill the gaps. There is no urgency. If it were serious, it would be able to quell the alarm of the Irish government about the dangers of a return of a hard border to the island of Ireland. It has nothing to say, just as it has nothing to say on every great issue Brexit raises except the position of EU migrants. If it were serious, it would now be recruiting trade negotiators who could cut deals with the rest of the world. As it is, ministers have confirmed only one senior appointment. If it were serious, our diplomats would look as if they could handle tough EU negotiators. As it is, the British team looks such a shower, Brussels bureaucrats think London must surely be setting a trap to lull them into a sense of false security.

And Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College, London, reckons a second Brexit referendum is looking more and more likely by the day:

With a deadlocked parliament, the possibility of an unfavourable deal and both parties so deeply divided on Europe, it may start to appear that the only way out of the impasse is a second referendum in which the government’s deal is put to the people for legitimation. That appears unlikely at the moment. Yet a referendum on Europe appeared even more unlikely when, in 1971, Tony Benn proposed it to Labour’s national executive but failed to find a seconder. James Callaghan presciently declared that for a divided party, the referendum might well prove a “rubber life raft into which the whole party may one day have to climb”. The Conservatives too may come to eventually need that life raft … Brexit after all raises fundamental, indeed existential, issues for the future of the country. That is why the final deal needs the consent not only of parliament, but of a sovereign people.

Tweet of the week

The Brexit clock, lest we forget, is ticking: