Paris (AFP)
Brexit is a "tragedy" which deprives Great Britain, also confronted with the circulation of a new very contagious strain of the virus, of the assistance which the European Union could have provided it, regretted Monday the Commissioner of the Market interior Thierry Breton.
"I am going to say it with my heart, it is a tragedy what is happening in Great Britain, and this Brexit is a tragedy, we see it more every day, we deeply regret this decision" even if "we respect it , because the British people are sovereign, of course, "said the official on BFM Business radio.
"If Great Britain had decided to stay in the European Union, today it would have, like all European countries, between 30, 40 and 50 billion euros and we could today help it as it goes be the case for all of us with the Commission's Next Generation EU fund.
"Britain is depriving itself of it," he lamented.
Funded by a common loan and endowed with 750 billion euros, including more than 300 billion in subsidies to member states, this European recovery plan must be implemented during 2021, with the first payments to be made by the end of the first. trimester.
France is to receive around 40 billion euros.
"And there is this Brexit that never ends, whatever happens Britain will be the loser, of course I want us to come to an agreement" and "I think in the end we will have an agreement but that time wasted, that procrastination, and all that for what? "asked Thierry Breton.
Post-Brexit negotiations between the European Union and the United Kingdom are expected to continue on Monday after a weekend focused on the issue of fisheries, which blocks any prospect of an agreement with only eleven days of the final rupture.
They collide with the discovery of a new "out of control" variant of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom, which has prompted the government to reconfigure London and several European countries, including Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. Ireland, to suspend their links with this country.
© 2020 AFP