Chancellor Kern: UK should pay 60 Bio. € (Br)exit-fee

[IceAgeComing]

I've been working for the European Parliament and part of my job involves tracking the Brexit news - I have no inside information or anything but I think that I'm pretty well informed on the subject.

The fact is that the only real concessions that we've seen during this whole pre-article 50 period has been by the UK government: they spent months going on about how they could have both single market membership and controls on migration while the EU were saying "no; single market membership is linked to accepting the four freedoms".  Turns out that the EU position was firm (despite the UK government attempting to bribe some of the new member states by fiddling with the international aid budgets) and its been the UK who've had to change their position to accept reality.

Will it be that €60 billion figure?  I don't know: but I imagine that there'll have to be some kind of contributions in the short term for budget contributions that were already promised in the 2014 budget round - some of those like pension liabilities might end up lasting a fairly long time.  Then again there are assets held by the EU that the UK might try to claim to reduce those contributions, and that's usually the way that these things work: both sides have claims on assets but also responsibilities on shares of liabilities.  There's also the fact that the UK will want some kind of trade deal with the EU and probably also for positive relations with our near neighbours, and refusing to pay the money that we promised to pay would lead to none of that happening for a very long time - the "tax haven" stuff really wasn't seen in the EU as anything other than an empty threat.  There's also the political implications of that happening: its not like this was a landslide victory for leave and the hardest of hard Brexits where WTO membership wouldn't even by guaranteed (the EU have a veto right) would probably annoy a chunk of that leave support; the economic impact of it certainly would.