Brexit: "An enormous amount of issues that remain to be settled..."

The third round of Brexit talks started badly this week, with negotiators on both sides barely able to conceal their frustration.

While we await the outcome of the October European Council, where EU leaders will decide in October whether “sufficient progress” has been made for trade negotiations to start, Brexit negotiations are not going at full steam ahead and European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, has voiced his dissatisfaction of Britain for failing to prepare for Brexit talks.

“I’ve read all the position papers produced by Her Majesty’s government and none of them is satisfactory,” Juncker exclaimed recently at a conference in Brussels, as talks between the U.K. and the EU resumed. “There is still an enormous amount of issues that remain to be settled,” he added.

The U.K.’s bill is a major spanner in the works for the progress of these negotiations. while the U.K. has accepted it will pay something, Brexit Secretary David Davis appears determined not to tell the EU where it accepts it’s on the hook. 

Bloomberg wrote that "the stage had already been set for an intense round of negotiations after chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Brexit Secretary David Davis met on Monday for the first time since July and candidly aired their frustration at each other’s approaches. Barnier said time was running out, as the U.K. continued in its bid to change the order of topics discussed."

While the U.K. has published 11 documents outlining its positions in areas that need to be settled as part of its withdrawal from the EU, European diplomats have only gone on to criticize the documents for being unrealistic and failing to nail down what the U.K. was asking for.

“We believe we are in a good position and we would like to move on to discuss our future relationship,” May’s spokeswoman Alison Donnelly told reporters in London this week.