Tom Goodenough

‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ is no longer the basis of the divide over Brexit, says the Daily Telegraph. Instead, the new split is over to what extent post-Brexit Britain should ‘mirror what the EU does on trade and services’ or whether the UK should ‘plough its own furrow in the world’. 18 months on from the referendum, this key debate has not been ‘addressed by the Government’. ‘Convergers’ – those who want Britain's trade arrangements to remain broadly in line with the status quo – ‘have the upper hand’ at the moment, says the Telegraph.

EU leaders look set to formally approve a move on to the next stage in Brexit talks today in Brussels. Yet back home, this week saw the government suffer its first defeat on Brexit legislation in Parliament. So will the actions of the Tory rebels leave the government hamstrung? The Tory rebellion may prove to be a 'momentous vote foreshadowing serious cross-party opposition’ to Britain’s departure from the EU, says the FT. Or it could just be ‘fury and thunder signifying nothing’. What it certainly shows though, according to the FT, is that Parliament is willing to stick up for itself. The ‘Brexit mutineers’ ‘should be congratulated’, says the paper.

The government’s defeat in the House of Commons last night amounts to a ‘bitter humiliation’ for ministers, says the Sun. It is also ‘a moment of shame for the Tory “rebels”’. In defeating the government, the Tory MPs who sided with the opposition ‘utterly compromised’ Theresa May as she heads to Brussels today. As well as making life difficult for the Prime Minister, they have also ‘handed a victory’ to those who want to reverse Brexit, says the Sun. Now the onus is on the PM to ‘find a solution’ to the challenge of negotiating a deal ‘without fearing Remainers in Parliament will kill it’.

Corbynistas are curiously quiet this morning about the latest YouGov poll, which puts Theresa May narrowly ahead of the Labour leader for the first time since June. 42 per cent of voters back the Tories, with 41 per cent saying they would vote for Labour. May’s success in securing a deal with the EU in the first stage of Brexit talks seems to be the clear reason for this latest small boost. For a government low on confidence and on the back of a difficult year, it is a welcome sign. But this lead, which falls within the margin of error in polling, is nothing for the Tories to really cheer about. Indeed it still shows that the party is down on its support from the snap election, when it secured 42.4 per cent of the vote.

Britain and the European Union will progress to the next stage of Brexit talks following a breakthrough in negotiations overnight. The European Commission said that sufficient progress had been made in discussions on the Brexit divorce bill, the Irish border and citizens’ rights to allow trade talks to get underway. There is no doubt that the deal is good news for the embattled Prime Minister, with some suggesting that her survival depended on progress being made before Christmas. But the agreement will not be without controversy. In particular, a passage in today's text promising that the government is committed to maintaining 'full alignment with...

Another day, another Brexit warning: this time it comes from the head of Standard Chartered, who says that Britain’s imminent departure from the EU is already having a negative impact. Bill Winters said that his bank is already 'preparing for the worst'. The Sun says that the ‘same old commentators’ are repeating themselves constantly with their warnings that ‘Britain’s going to hell in a handcart’ as a result of Brexit. ‘Give it a rest’, the paper urges them. The Sun goes on to concede that yesterday ‘wasn’t a good day for the Government’.

Not for the first time, David Davis’s words came back to haunt him as he was quizzed on Brexit today. The Brexit secretary, who is having something of a tough week in a year of tough weeks, told MPs that no detailed sector-by-sector analysis of what the impact of leaving the European Union would be had been carried out. He said this morning that: ‘The usefulness of such a detailed impact assessment is near zero and given how we were stretching our resources to get to where we were at the time, it was not a sensible use of resources.’ So far, so simple. The only problem? As Hilary Benn was all too keen to point out, Davis has not always taken this line. Benn picked up on comments Davis made to the Foreign Affairs Committee on September 13th last year.

‘At last’, says the FT, Britain has ‘accepted it must pay its dues to Europe’. ‘It has been a tortuous journey’ to get to this stage and ‘months have been wasted’ along the way. Yet while progress has been made at last, the government has still failed ‘to explain to the public the…cost of leaving’. It’s also the case that while the Brexit divorce offer is now more acceptable to the EU, the bill is ‘only one of three areas in which agreement is needed to unlock talks on the future relationship’. Avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland remains the trickiest of these problems to find a solution to, and it remains an issue without a ‘simple resolution’.

All eyes this morning are on Britain’s Brexit divorce bill, but meanwhile Labour’s Brexit strategy remains as confused as ever. Diane Abbott is the latest figure from the party’s frontbench to hint at the possibility of a second referendum, despite this being ruled out by Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to June’s snap election. In a letter to two constituents this month, the shadow home secretary wrote: ‘I will argue for the right of the electorate to vote on any deal that is finally agreed.’ Abbott is now suggesting those remarks were ‘poorly worded’. This seems hard to believe; indeed, that sentence couldn’t have been much clearer: voters should get another say.

The warnings about Brexit could not have been clearer: leaving the EU would lead to an exodus of foreign workers and students from Britain. So far though the reality hasn’t quite matched that prediction. The Sun picks up on news today that a record number of overseas students – 70,900 – applied to study in Britain last year. ‘NHS workers from the EU are on the up, too’, says the paper, which argues that, despite the warnings, Britain will remain ‘attractive for those wanting to better their lot’. Yet the large number of people who do want to come to Britain also means ‘it is right that we take control of our borders once we leave the EU’. ‘Taking in a city the size of Newcastle every year is not sustainable’, says the Sun.

Only a month ago, in its damning editorial the Daily Mail said Philip Hammond was a ‘dismal, defeatist, relentlessly negative’ Eeyore. Today, they ‘rescind’ the Chancellor’s nickname, and the paper isn’t the only one to praise Hammond’s Budget: The Sun says that Hammond delivered his first Budget for its readers. While the paper admits that it has ‘not been kind to his previous efforts’, the Chancellor’s announcement yesterday ‘will put more cash’ in peoples’ pockets. His freezes on fuel and alcohol duty go down well with the Sun; and so, too, do the ‘decent hikes’ to the minimum wage and tax-free allowance.

The furore over the Brexit divorce bill has been such that it is easy to forget that it isn't the only major sticking point in talks with the EU. Theresa May looks set to up Britain’s offer this week (from €20bn to around €40bn), in the hope that more cash on the table will unlock the next stage of negotiations. But Michel Barnier’s speech today should serve as a warning to the British government: things won’t necessarily get easier when the Brexit divorce bill is sorted. In fact, Barnier makes it clear that talks could get even more difficult. The EU’s chief negotiator hinted that Britain would still miss out on a trade deal if it doesn’t agree to tie itself down to a ‘European model’ after Brexit.