On his first day back, Boris Johnson is already making Brexit demands from EU negotiators

Just when you thought you had heard the last of it, Brexit goes and rears its ugly head again and to be honest, it's the last thing anyone needs right now.

With Boris Johnson now back as prime minister after recovering from coronavirus, the government is eager to crack on with negotiations and make the UK a fully independent state, free of the EU’s single market and customs union rules, which is it still currently aligned to.

Despite there being a global pandemic, both the EU and the UK government have been eager to crack on with negotiations despite bigger and more important things going on right now.

With that being said the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, last week accused the UK of failing to engage on key issues and that progress on trade talks had been "disappointing."

However, the UK government has said that the EU cannot accept the 'political realities' of Brexit and that it is up to Barnier's team to move the negotiations forward, despite there being an international crisis going on.

A spokesperson for the prime minister said on Monday:

We are ready to keep talking but that does not make us any more likely to agree the EU’s proposals in areas where they are not taking into account the UK’s status as an independent state.

Clearly there will need to be political movement on the EU side to move negotiations forward, particularly on fisheries and level playing field issues, in order to help find a balanced solution which reflects the political realities on both sides.

What we want is an agreement which is based on precedent, what the EU is seeking to do is impose conditions upon us which it has not required in other free trade agreements which it has agreed with sovereign countries around the world.

We are quite clear that we are leaving the transition period on December 31, we will work with the EU to try to do that with a deal. But nobody should be in any doubt that the transition period is going to end on December 31.

The UK's transition period is due to end on December 31. Whether or not the coronavirus pandemic will be over by then remains to be seen but it seems clear that the never-ending rollercoaster that is Brexit has a few more loops to go before it is finally over with.

You would hope that with everything going on that they could find some solidarity and just agree on something, for once.