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British government sees no point in being at event in Rome because UK will not be involved in planning bloc’s future  Theresa May with Angela Merkel at the EU summit in Malta. The British PM is not expected to attend the Rome summit. Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Jennifer Rankin   Theresa May  is expected to miss the EU’s 60th anniversary summit in March because the British government sees no point in being involved in planning the future of the EU. The British prime minister was invited to join the celebrations on 25 March with 27 other EU leaders but decided not to take part, a senior EU diplomat told the Guardian. “The door was open, but the response was, ‘We don’t think it is appropriate for us,’” the diplomat said, summarising the UK response. A second EU source said May’s decision was “entirely logical” because the main focus of the summit would be the future. “We are still a union of 28 and Theresa is of course very welcome to come and celebrate 60 years of the EU in Rome,” t

THE future of British trade after Brexit is shrouded in uncertainty. It is an unprecedented process, so it is hard to know where to look for clues as to how it may work out. One possibility is a country whose trading patterns were perhaps more disrupted than any other’s by Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973: New Zealand. Just as Brexit is likely to mean the end of British access to the single market, so “Brentry” ended New Zealand’s preferential access to the “mother country”. In 1961, when Britain first announced its intention to join the EEC, it took about half of New Zealand’s exports—a similar proportion to the EU’s share of British exports today. New Zealand’s prime minister at the time, Keith Holyoake, warned his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan, that, without safeguards for its exports, New Zealand would be “ruined”. After years of negotiations, a transitional deal in 1971 agreed quotas for New Zealand butter, cheese and lamb over a five

More than half of Britain’s major businesses are already experiencing the implications of leaving the EU, a survey shows. Over half of Britain’s major companies have experienced the negative impacts of the country’s pending withdrawal from the European Union (EU), shows a new survey of British business leaders. About 58 percent of bosses from Britain’s largest 500 firms think their businesses are already facing the implications of last year’s public vote to leave the EU, according to an Ipsos Mori poll published on Monday. This is while, only 11 percent of the respondents thought the outlook of the divorce has worked to the benefit of their businesses. In June last year, nearly 52 percent of Britons voted to end the country’s decades-long membership in the EU. The decision meant that while the UK would free itself from the EU regulations and have more control over its borders, it would lose access to the Single Market, a scary prospect for businesses that relied heavily on the t

The Bank of England is feeling the heat again after its new, more upbeat picture for Britain's economy put an uncomfortable focus back on its warning last year about a quick and sharp Brexit vote hit to growth. Governor Mark Carney woke up on Friday to headlines in anti-European Union newspapers that accused him of leading the Bank into a U-turn. "More humble pie for Bank as economy keeps growing," the Daily Express said. The BoE surprised investors on Thursday when it hiked its forecast for growth this year to 2.0 percent. That was up from a call of 1.4 percent made just three months ago and represented a leap from its first post-referendum forecast of 0.8 percent. The new prediction was higher than all but one of 50 forecasts by private economists in a Reuters poll in January, raising some eyebrows in the City of London. The BoE also edged up its growth forecasts for the following two years. At the same time, Carney and his fellow policymakers lowered their forecast