We take a look at what amounts to first outline of what the future relationship between the US and the UK might look like – as far as the EU is concerned

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Last week the EU published its draft guidelines on a trade deal with the UK, and although broadly as expected, they didn’t make happy reading for Britain.

The six pages of the draft sketched out a bare-bones free trade agreement that Donald Tusk again stressed was all that could concretely be offered to the UK because of its by now familiar red lines on free movement, EU budget contributions and the European court of justice.



After Theresa May’s Mansion House speech calling for a deep and ambitious trade deal based on “mutual recognition” of standards and “managed divergence” of regulations after Brexit – plus, of course, “as frictionless trade as possible” – the European council president was characteristically pointed. He said it was simply not in the bloc’s interests to give way to the PM’s “pick and mix” approach, and that unlike May it wasn’t the EU’s overriding objective to show British voters that Brexit was bang-on the right choice and would be a rip-roaring success. (He didn’t use exactly those words, but that was the drift.)

With Jon Henley to look at the outline of the proposed deal, and the UK’s response to it, in a bit more detail are the Guardian’s Brexit editor Dan Roberts and Brussels correspondent Jennifer Rankin.

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