5 to midnight on Brexit talks? No pressure! says France

France insisted Wednesday that European Union negotiators should not yield to any time pressure imposed by the Jan. 1 economic cutoff date in the talks with Britain on a post-Brexit trade agreement, arguing that no deal would be better than a bad one.

Negotiators are dealing with EU fisheries rights in U.K. waters and a few remaining fair competition issues as the last outstanding problems in the nine-month talks that are seeking to avert a chaotic transition on New Year's Day when Britain fully leaves the EU's single market.

Beyond the imposition of customs checks and other barriers, a trade deal would avert the imposition of tariffs and duties that could cost both sides hundreds of thousands of jobs.

But the diplomatic brinkmanship continued despite the urgency for a deal.

“We should not put ourselves, Europeans, under time pressure to finished by this hour or that day. Otherwise we would be put ourselves in a situation to make bad concessions," France's Europe Minister Clement Beaune told the BFM network.

EU officials have already said they would negotiate past Jan. 1 if necessary.

Rumors of a pre-Christmas Brexit trade deal had risen over the past days based on progress on all the outstanding issues, beyond fishing. Some EU nations insisted, however, that upon close scrutiny, Britain's latest proposals on quotas for EU vessels in U.K. waters were far less conciliatory than first met the eye.

And Beaune also raised fair competition rules as a sticking point, even if some other EU officials said they were close to being dealt with.

The EU has long feared that Britain would undercut the bloc's social, environmental and state aid rules to be able to gain an unfair edge with its exports to the EU. Britain has said that having to meet EU rules would undercut its...