Brexit news – live: UK subject to ‘most export rules in world’, France says as fishing industry attacks deal

Home Secretary Priti Patel insisted the Brexit deal will help make the UK safer, despite police chiefs’ concerns about lack of access to a key EU information database.

The deal allows the two sides to co-operate on security and policing issues, but Brussels said the UK will no longer have “direct, real-time access” to sensitive information.

UK officials insisted the deal would ensure law enforcement officers had the tools they needed, while new border controls and the end of free movement would help protect the public.

In the run-up to the UK’s separation from the European Union, police chiefs have raised concerns about access to information and the loss of the European Arrest Warrant.

The Home Office said the agreement includes streamlined extradition arrangements, fast and effective exchange of national DNA, fingerprint and vehicle registration data and continued transfers of Passenger Name Record data.

Airline passengers flying to the US from the UK will have to produce a negative Covid-19 test from the three days before travel as authorities there try to prevent the new coronavirus variant gaining a toehold in the country.

Travellers will be banned from boarding aircraft if they cannot provide written documentation of a lab-based test to the airline, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said in a Christmas Day statement.

The new rules will be applied from 28 December onwards, it added.

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Transport secretary Grant Shapps has revealed that more than 10,000 lorry drivers have been tested for coronavirus amid demands from France that everyone arriving from the UK prove they have tested negative. 

Twenty-four of those drivers have tested positive, Mr Shapps says.

The 27 European Union states are expected to formally back the post-Brexit trade deal within days.

Ambassadors from the member states were being briefed on the contents of the deal on Christmas Day by Michel Barnier, who led Brussels’ negotiating team in the talks with the UK.

They have written to the European Parliament to say they intend to take a decision on the preliminary application of the deal within days.

The timing of the deal has forced politicians and officials in the UK and Brussels to tear up Christmas plans.

MPs and peers will be called back to Westminster on December 30 to vote on the deal, but MEPs are not expected to approve it until the new year, meaning it will have to apply provisionally until they give it the green light.

The draft treaty and associated Brexit agreements stretch to 1,246 pages of complex legal text.

Thousands of international lorry drivers are spending Christmas Day in their cabs at the English Channel border amid ongoing coronavirus chaos.

Some 1,100 soldiers have been deployed to Kent to help carry out coronavirus testing after French authorities agreed trucks could entry to the country if their drivers were found negative for Covid-19.

More than 700 trucks have been cleared for departure since that decision on Wednesday.

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It’s fair to say some of the UK’s most prominent Brexiteers are in jubilant mood after the UK and EU announced a bare bones trade deal in time for 1 January. 

Nigel Farage said the deal with “not perfect” but called it a “victory” for “ordinary men and women”. 

Kate Hoey, the former Labour Party MP, hailed Boris Johnson as “back to his best”. 

Arron Banks, who bankrolled the Leave.EU campaign, said the country had “put the Great” back into Great Britain. 

Around 1,000 soldiers are spending Christmas Day trying to clear a huge backlog of truck drivers stuck in Dover after France briefly closed its border to the UK then demanded coronavirus tests from all amid fears of a new, apparently more contagious, virus variant.

Even as 4,000 international truck drivers spent yet another day cooped up in their cabs, some progress was evident Friday, with traffic around the port moving in an orderly fashion towards the extra ferries that were put on to make the short crossing across to Calais

The military personnel were directing traffic and helping a mass testing program for the drivers, who must test negative to enter France. French firefighters have also been drafted to help the military test drivers for coronavirus.

Officials from Britain’s Department for Transport said all but three of the 2,367 coronavirus tests conducted so far have been negative.

France closed its border for 48 hours to the UK last Sunday after Boris Johnson said a variant of the virus that is 70 per cent more transmissible is driving the rapid spread of infections in London and surrounding areas. As a result, the capital and many other parts of England have seen lockdown restrictions tightened and family holiday gatherings cancelled.

After four and a half long and torturous years, Brexit can finally get started. The reality of it didn’t change once in all that time, and it hasn’t changed now, writes Tom Peck.

That it took so many shapes and forms and inflicted so much psychological misery was purely because a long and dismal line of Conservative governments and politicians either couldn’t understand, couldn’t face or couldn’t tell the truth about its blunt simplicity.

There was so much rubbish spoken, so loudly and for so long, that it came to form its own mad world of denial, which many a Tory will go on living in, quite possibly for the rest of their days.

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JP Morgan has said suggested the bad news outweighs the good news for the UK regarding its trade deal with the UK.

“The good news is that a disruptive and acrimonious ‘no deal’ has been avoided,” JPMorgan’s Malcolm Barr wrote in a research note on Thursday, which was quoted by CNN. 

“The bad news for the UK, in our view, is that the EU appears to have secured a deal which allows it to retain nearly all of the advantages it derives from its trading relationship with the UK, while giving it the ability to use regulatory structures to cherry pick among the sectors where the UK had previously enjoyed advantages in the trading relationship.”

Boris Johnson has bemoaned the lack of “snogging under the mistletoe” that can be enjoyed this Christmas while heralding his Brexit deal as “glad tidings of great joy” in a video message to the public.

Just hours after finally brokering a trade agreement with the EU following a string of missed deadlines, Mr Johnson published a video to Twitter saying the 500-page document could serve as  a “present for anyone who may be looking for something to read in that sleepy post-Christmas lunch moment”.

“The oven-ready deal was just the starter,” he said in reference to the withdrawal agreement implemented in January this year. Lifting the document aloft, he added: “This is the feast – full of fish, by the way.”

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