President Emmanuel Macron has told Boris Johnson to “get serious” or remain locked out of discussions over how to curb the flow of people escaping war and poverty across the Channel. Here is my colleague Jon Henley’s analysis of the row.
And here is an excerpt. It is Johnson’s final proposal, a bilateral returns agreement with France plus talks to establish a UK-EU returns agreement, that seems to have sparked the fiercest reaction. Since Britain left the EU, it is no longer able to use the bloc’s Dublin system for returning migrants to the first member state they entered. It has not so far negotiated any bilateral deals. Macron has repeatedly stated the French view that France is merely a transit country for the very small percentage – roughly 3% – of migrants who enter the EU with the UK as their preferred final destination, and that the only long-term solution is greater Europe-wide cooperation to tackle a European – indeed, global – issue. French fishing crews have mounted “symbolic” protests at the Channel tunnel and three ports in northern France in a day of action against the British government over the ongoing dispute about access of French boats in the Channel. The failure of the world to get vaccines to the developing world is “coming back to haunt us”, Gordon Brown has warned, as experts said the emergence of variants such as B.1.1.529 could have been avoided if jabs had been more fairly distributed. Thousands of Britons in South Africa and many more with bookings to travel have had their plans thrown into disarray as flights were suspended on Friday. Stock markets around the world plunged on Friday as investors sold shares, commodities and even cryptocurrency amid concerns that a new coronavirus variant, described as potentially the worst so far identified, could usher in a fresh wave of global pandemic restrictions. As Mark Sweney and Rob Davies report, the FTSE 100 fell 3% in early trading and failed to regain any lost ground during the day, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 2.5%. Boris Johnson’s proposal for a bridge or tunnel linking Scotland to Northern Ireland has been rejected by a feasibility study as vastly expensive – £335bn for the bridge or £209bn for the tunnel – and fraught with potential difficulties. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters expect him to stand as an independent in Islington North at the next general election if he is not allowed to represent the Labour party – and believe he would have a good chance of winning.