Emmanuel Macron bashes Britain and warns getting a Brexit trade deal by December will be ‘tense’
EMMANUEL Macron has bashed Britain and warned getting a Brexit trade deal by December will be "tense".
The French President vowed the EU will demand access to Britain’s fisheries, which would enrage the UK government.
Mr Macron also claimed the UK’s no nonsense approach would make things harder and stop Boris Johnson getting his bumper trade deal by the end of the year.
He said: “It's going to be tense because they are very tough.
“Boris Johnson has a card in his hand and it is fishing and with that he will try to gain access to the market.
“It is not certain that we will have a global deal by the end of the year.”
EU officials had previously threatened not to give Britain a trade deal unless they get full access to UK waters.
Pierre Karleskind, the newly-elected chairman of the European Parliament's Fisheries Committee ruled out accepting anything less than the current arrangements.
The threat comes despite Boris Johnson already telling Brussels that Britain will become an independent coastal state at the end of the year.
Mr Karleskind had said: “First of all, we have to negotiate a new fisheries agreement with the United Kingdom before 1 July this year.
“We request reciprocal access to waters, meaning the same situation as we have now - nothing more, nothing less.
“With this being one condition for concluding the economic partnership.”
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Earlier this week the PM's chief EU negotiator David Frost vowed Number 10 was not bluffing about walking away if Brussels failed to meet their red lines.
He said: “We bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country.
“It is central to our vision that we must have the ability to set laws that suit us - to claim the right that every other non-EU country in the world has.
“It isn't a simple negotiating position which might move under pressure - it is the point of the whole project.”
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