Nigel Farage – a leader of the campaign for the U.K.to leave – said the speech was more of the bad old European Union, of increased power-grabbing.
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Juncker said greater defense cooperation also makes economic sense for the bloc’s member states, since it would reduce wasteful duplication of effort by individual nations, and he called for a specific defense fund before the end of the year to boost common research projects.
“Britain had not many friends any more”.
“Time pressure would have negative consequences for the quality of the negotiation result”, Hardt said, adding that many politicians shared his personal wish for Britain to indefinitely postpone triggering article 50. “Indeed (Juncker’s speech) was the usual recipe – more Europe, in this particular case, more military Europe”. Instead of obligatory, he said, “solidarity must be voluntary, must come from the heart”.
In a summit invitation letter published late on Tuesday, Donald Tusk, EU president, said it would be a “fatal error” for the EU to ignore the lessons of Brexit and urged the bloc to be less “politically correct” on migration.
Leaders of the 27 European Union countries will begin to gather on Thursday in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava to discuss the future of the bloc.
Negotiations between the United Kingdom and EU will start by the end of 2017 but not until after the German elections, the first president of the European Council said on Thursday.
“We have to stop this war according to which all success is national and all failure is European”, Juncker said.
Van Rompuy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, while initial negotiations on the broad outline of a deal could begin as soon as the British government triggered article 50, the more hard negotiation phase would have to wait until late 2017.
“We respect and at the same time regret the United Kingdom decision, but the European Union as such is not at risk”, said Juncker, who officially launched the EC’s Brexit “task force” on Wednesday. The commission has also redefined Internet access as a “universal service”.
“Only those can have unlimited access to the internal market who accept that there will be free access for persons and goods”.
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Huge risk and harm could be inflicted on London’s financial services sector if the industry is not given enough time to adjust to Britain’s future trading relationship with the European Union, banking bosses have warned.
