Theresa May Accuses E.U. Officials of Meddling in U.K. Election
Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats — the party
that is most opposed to a British exit and that wants Britons to vote again on any final deal — said as much on Tuesday: "This is a Brexit election and a chance to change the direction of Britain." On Sunday, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung gave an insider’s account of the first working dinner last Wednesday at Downing Street between Mrs. May and her team and Mr. Juncker and his.
By STEVEN ERLANGER and JAMES KANTERMAY 3, 2017
LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May kicked off the formal start of the British election campaign on Wednesday by accusing some in the European
Union bureaucracy of misrepresenting the British position on exiting the bloc and even of trying to influence the election itself.
Clearly the result of a leak from the commission — Britons generally blame Mr. Juncker’s chief of cabinet, Martin Selmayr, a German — the report described Mr. Juncker’s astonishment at the gap between the sides and his view
that the British and Mrs. May were living in "a different galaxy." Please verify you’re not a robot by clicking the box.
Mr. Barnier said that 3.2 million European Union citizens in Britain
and 1.2 million Britons living in other countries in the bloc could not be left in legal limbo and needed the assurances of lifetime residency and access to health care, social security and pension rights guaranteed by the European Court of Justice — a court whose jurisdiction Britain wants to abandon as part of its exit.
Mr. Juncker was said to believe that Mrs. May did not understand the complexity of the task, the size of the "divorce settlement" Britain would have to pay or the European Union’s insistence
that Britain negotiate a future relationship with the bloc only after the settlement was essentially completed.
Earlier on Wednesday in Brussels, the European Union’s chief negotiator for the exit, Michel Barnier, laid out detailed priorities for the two years of talks, warning London to address the concerns of millions of people about their residency and pension rights and repeating
that the divorce bill had to be settled before talks could start on a future trade relationship.
