UK ‘agrees to hand over £50bn Brexit divorce bill leaving us paying out to Brussels for decades’
Sources said that the EU's demands for 60billion Euros will be met - after Theresa May secured sign-off to up our offer last week
BRITAIN is set to continue handing over cash to Brussels for decades to come, it was claimed today as reports said the UK would pay around £50billion in a divorce bill.
Theresa May has tabled a whopping offer to the EU in a bid to move talks forward and start negotiating a future trade deal, European sources have said.
Officials in David Davis’s Department for Exiting the EU said they “did not recognise” the figure and insisted crunch talks were on going in Brussels.
But the pound soared 1 per cent when the news first emerged last night - signalling that markets are confident this will be the breakthrough which moves Brexit negotiations on to the next stage.
The claim emerged from the EU side just a week after Theresa May officially signalled she was willing to up Britain’s offer to £38billion to get talks moving.
EU sources a deal was sealed in a behind-the-scenes flurry of meetings with British officials last week - and Mrs May talked sums with EU chiefs.
But DExEU insisted these “intensive talks continue to take place in Brussels this week as we seek to reach an agreement.”
The UK has agreed it must take a share in the EU's liabilities which will total as much as €98billion (£87billion), .
But that gross figure will reportedly amount to a net payout of around half that because some of the claims on the European budget will never actually come to pass.
Payouts will continue for several decades because they include pensions payouts to civil servants who will still be claiming cash in 50 years or more, according to reports.
The deal is set to be formally offered to Jean-Claude Juncker when the PM meets him on Monday.
Chris Grayling, the pro-Brexit Transport Secretary, did not dispute the reports this morning, telling BBC Radio 4: "The price is meeting the obligations that we have built up, no more, no less than that."
But passionate Brexiteers and Remain supporters both slammed the huge divorce bill.
Nigel Farage said it was a "sellout", adding: "Make no mistake about it - €55billion to leave the EU is a very, very bad deal."
Pro-EU Labour MP Chuka Umunna said: "Boris, Gove and other Leave campaigners never said there would be a big divorce bill to pay - quite the opposite."
A further sign of significant movement came as Michel Barnier travelled to Berlin to talk numbers with the German finance minister.
The tight-lipped EU chief negotiator met with Angela Merkel and her top team last night as attention turns towards the crunch EU meeting to potentially green light Brexit trade talks on 14 December.
Separately, the Foreign Office revealed it was bringing diplomats back from around the world to help secure the Brexit deal.
Foreign Minister Sir Alan Duncan told MPs number of civil servant posts in places like Asia and Afghanistan were being reduced to pay for 50 new posts in EU countries.
And the final amount that Britain will agree to pay to unlock transition and trade talks is unlikely to be finalised until the entire exit deal has been signed ahead of the UK’s March 2019 EU exit.
In a second Brexit boost for Theresa May snap elections in Ireland that threatened to plunge December’s crunch summit into chaos appeared to have been swerved.
Ireland’s outspoken premier Leo Varadkar was left humiliated by the resignation of his deputy but Brexit turmoil was diverted by the departure, to the delight of British negotiators.
Ireland’s deputy prime minister Frances Fitzgerald said she resigned over her handling of a whistleblower scandal in the national interest and to avoid an “unwelcome and potentially destabilising” snap election.
The resignation came just hours after Brussels signalled a climb down from Mr Varadkar’s hardline demands that Theresa May gives him a written solution to how the Irish border would work after Brexit or he would veto moving onto trade talks at the December summit.
The British Government were deeply worried the threat of an insurgent Sinn Fein at the ballot box was forcing Mr Varadkar’s government to take the hardest possible line against Britain.
Ministers believed this fear of the political wing of the IRA prompted the newbie Irish PM’s outspoken war of words on Theresa May.
Two weeks ago Mr Varadkar compared Mrs May to a cheating wife who wished for an “open relationship” with Brussels.
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Yesterday former Foreign Secretary William Hague heaped pressure on the Dublin government to tone down their impossible Brexit demands of Northern Ireland staying in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union after Brexit.
Lord Hague wrote: “It would be a mistake for anyone in Dublin to think that Theresa May’s dependence on the DUP is the main barrier to the huge concession they are seeking.
“Splintering the UK is asking too much of Conservatives and many others in Britain,” he added.