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The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said on Monday that if the UK leave the single market then financial firms will lose their EU passporting rights. He claimed the UK cannot “cherry pick” at aspects of the single market and it will lose the benefits of the single market when it leaves the European Union. Speaking at a conference by the Centre for European Reform, Mr Barnier said: “On financial services, UK voices suggest that Brexit does not mean Brexit. Brexit means Brexit, everywhere.

Brussles should be granted the power to punish rogue member states flouting “EU values” by withholding billions of pounds in funding from them, a landmark report says today. The dossier, compiled by the influential Centre for European Reform think tank, says the bloc’s current deterrents are too weak and have “proved impossible to use in practice”. 

The developments in Britain took place as Michel Barnier, the EU Brexit negotiator, backed Ireland’s bid to avoid a hard border. “I know that this point is politically sensitive in the UK, it is not less sensitive in Ireland,” he said at a Centre for European Reform conference in Brussels yesterday.

“I don’t think it makes much difference to Brexit in the short term, because the positions of various parties in Berlin are all pretty hard-line on the issues,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform. “But it might matter in the long term, because if the negotiations get stuck, Merkel and Macron could intervene to get a deal,” he said. “That might not happen if Merkel disappears, because the EU got used to her knocking heads together.”

“If we manage to negotiate an orderly withdrawal, to fully respect the integrity of the single market and establish a level playing field, there is every reason for our future partnership to be ambitious. This is our preferred option,” Michel Barnier told the Centre for European conference in Brussels on Monday.

Michel Barnier told a conference in Brussels that London needs to provide clear proposals soon to find a way for the UK to leave the EU in 2019 but still have a transparent, open border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland. "Those who wanted Brexit must offer solutions," Barnier told a Centre for European Reform conference in Brussels.

In a speech to the Centre for European Reform which will enrage Eurosceptics, Mr Barnier insisted that any attempt to create new rules after Brexit even on domestic issues such as farming and healthcare will meet fierce resistance from the EU.

The European Union’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has ruled out the prospect of UK financial firms benefiting from a special post-Brexit deal that will give them continued access to Europe’s single market.“Those who claim that the UK should cherry-pick part of the single market must stop this contradiction,” Mr Barnier said at the Centre for European reform conference in Brussels on Monday.“The single market is a package of four indivisible freedoms, common rules, institutions and enforcement structure. The UK knows these rules very well, like the back of its hand. It has contributed to defining them.”