Because they are going through the EU's outline paper and the details.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/essential-principles-financial_settlement_en_2.pdf

What do you want the UK to do? They are the ones demanding money of us. It is up to them to justify it.

Say we will pay XYZ and then the EU to say yes/no?

All Davies agreed to do is to start on those 3 points.

The EU does not want to talk trade until they think 'sufficient progress' has been made on those 3 points.

That is up to the EU.

We cannot ever force them to talk trade if they dont want a trade deal.

If they offer a decent trade deal they might get more cash off us.

But only an idiot would pay up front.

They are going through the lines of what the EU is asking for and the legal advice they have with the EU.

That is hardly doing nothing.

What more do you expect us to do? Make an offer and see if they accept it?

Whenever we offer something on citizens rights they say it is not enough.

The EU is just looking for us to fold regardless of law because they need our money.

At the end of the day the EU will either do trade talks that benefit everyone or they won't.

Using this to run down the clock to put pressure on us to pay more is from negotiation 101 classes.

What the EU wants is you pay £300,000 up front for a super car, but won't let you see it until you've paid, when it may be a 1990 VW Golf with the engine missing.

And remoaners think this a good idea, and that walking away without a car should be illegal.

no the eu wants me to overpay for a supercar and will let me pay on delivery

i know how much this supercar is worth (hopefully)

and therefore in time will get the car for that price

it may take some time to get to this price, but get there i shall

The Brexit secretary has conceded that Britain has “obligations” from its 44 years of EU membership, but will not say anything about what they might be when he meets the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, in Brussels next week, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/
aug/23/david-davis-to-avoid-putting-brexit-payment-on-table-in-brussels

David Davis has said the UK's refusal to commit to a figure for the EU divorce bill until later this year has made the European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier "quite cross" with British negotiators.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday morning before the government's customs union transition plan is published, the Brexit Secretary claimed the government was using "constructive ambiguity" as a deliberate tactic and "it will be difficult to read what we intend."

Davis said that while the UK "will meet any real international obligations... there won't be a number [agreed for the divorce bill] by October or November."

http://uk.businessinsider.com/david-davis-on-the-brexit
-divorce-bill-michel-is-getting-quite-cross-with-us-2017-8

I really can't see how you can possibly deny he is stalling.  Nearly two months ago he had an idea of the "obligations" and still hasn't moved forward with the issue.

The position "we will pay if we get a good trade deal" although attractive to the shire Tories is inconsistent and probably illegal.  The government shouldn't be paying anything unless it has a legal obligation and if it has such a legal obligation it should pay it.  (If it wants to make it difficult to pay and trash the UK's credit rating, fair enough but after imposing years of austerity to keep that credit rating?)

The right has no plan beyond a desire to turn Britain into a Randian dystopia where regulations vanish and the state withers. It has no policy beyond a nostalgic hope that Britain will sail across the wide blue oceans and conquer new markets as our imperial ancestors conquered them before.
The right offers religion, not politics. Its faith is without blemish, the gospel runs. If Brexit fails, that is not because the faith is false but because heretical traitors, judges, civil servants and EU governments have schemed to defeat it. “He that doubteth is damned,” said St Paul. “For whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Boris Johnson agrees.

Thatcherism, Britain’s last revolt of the right, was preceded by years of hard planningin the Centre for Policy Studies and Institute of Economic Affairs. If you were around in the 1970s, you might have loved or loathed it. But you could not deny the right had built a programme for government. Today, there is no plan, no programme, no nothing. Instead of being populated by serious thinkers, Brexit’s thinktanks are filled with propagandists, tabloid hacks and tax-exile newspaper proprietors. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are columnists turned politicians. The Sun, Telegraph,Mail and Express do not just cheer on the cause while the grown-ups make the real decisions, as they did in Margaret Thatcher’s day. They are what brains the Brexit campaign possesses.
Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, demonstrated the frivolity of the enterprise last year when he wiped his own campaign’s website after the referendum. It as if he was admitting the promises Johnson and Gove had made to 17.4 million voters were worthless. Now the heist had been pulled, he would destroy the incriminating evidence.

A global movement against over-mighty states in Ronald Reagan’s America and Mikhail Gorbachev ’s Soviet Union sustained the Thatcher government. The Brexiters have no one beyond Donald Trump and they don’t really have him. Along with all his other faults – the racism, the narcissism, the incessant mendacity – Trump is an “America first” protectionist. He will never give us a sweetheart deal to make up for lost European markets, even if Congress let him (which it would not).
The Brexiters have no allies, only enemies. Men such as Daniel Hannan and Bernard Jenkin have been fighting their opponents in the Tory party for 30 years. The wounds are too deep, the scars are too thick, for them to admit now the other side may have a point. If they once had a conception of Britain’s interests and the welfare of its citizens, they forgot it long ago. Beyond the desire to create an isolated state in the Atlantic, where welfare and regulations are slashed and climate change denied, is a more primal impulse. They cannot concede an inch to enemies, who have belittled them for most of their adult lives. Compromise in these psychological circumstances feels like a betrayal, even if the only compromise demanded of them is a compromise with reality.

So be my guest and say that Brexit is a movement of organised stupidity. But accept that as propagandists the Brexiters are anything but stupid. They have been the most brilliantly successful manipulators of public opinion in modern British history.
From the point of propaganda, their vices are virtues. During the referendum, the Remain campaign mocked Brexiters’ inability to offer the British a coherent account of our future. But laughter was misplaced. The inability to level with the public made the Leave campaign a moving target that never offered its opponents a clear line of attack.

The religious insistence that supporting Brexit is a matter of faith, not reason, has the propaganda benefit of keeping supporters in line. Despite the collapse in the pound and living standards, despite the descent of the negotiations into the mire, not one prominent supporter of Brexit has admitted to the smallest doubt. The normal arguments of politics no more exist on the right than they do in the Church of Scientology. Who will break ranks when they know a movement run by vicious hacks will denounce them as traitors? Newspaper proprietors have power without responsibility, Stanley Baldwin said, the “prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.
The harlot’s prerogative ensured that when Liam Fox said negotiating a deal with the EU will be “the easiest thing in human history”, or when David Davis promised in 2016 that by now we would have “trade deals with the US and China”, or when Johnson and Gove swore there would be £350m a week for the NHS, they never expected to be held to account. True democratic politicians are responsible for their words. The Brexit right never is.
Last week, the right showed how it is always two steps ahead of its opponents. It demanded the punishment of Phillip Hammond for refusing to shake the magic money tree and spend on new quangos and custom and excise bureaucracies in case we cannot reach a deal. It was a revealing tantrum. They know Brexit is going wrong. When it is revealed to be a bloody mess, they want to be able to say: “It’s not our fault. If only the government had listened to us in October 2017 we would be prosperous and free.”

The failure of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour frontbench to challenge the right is as irresponsible as the right’s failure to protect the national interest. Instead of listening to them, listen to the men and women who are prepared to fight in the Liberal Democrats, Scottish Nationalists and on the Labour backbenches. They know the best tactic is the simplest. “They hate it when you throw their words in their faces,” Labour’s Chuka Umunna told me. “They start shouting, ‘You want to refight the referendum’.”
To which the only response is, you promised to cut immigration, boost prosperity, secure global trade deals and restore parliamentary sovereignty. You can’t just wipe that off the web and pretend it never happened.
You do not win by treating 17.4 million people as stupid. You win by treating them as democratic citizens with the right to punish the men who made impossible promises. Once it is clear they will never be kept and were never meant to be kept, the question arises: is it time to think again?

With no legal obligation to pay the EU anything why do the EU expect us to make a good will gesture and hand over £50bn (or whatever) for investment projects in the EU that we will not benefit from?

The only reason the UK would pay anything would be to sweeten a trade deal.

At the moment the EU has nothing to negotiate with.

We should not pay anything unless we legally have to, it's the principle .
Trade talks and anything else are a seperate issue.

What is it exactly that the EU are going to offer Britain ? Let's wait and see.

Now so far I have not heard of any proposals for in the EU, apart from the concessions that they want the U.K. to make.
Well that's too bad, it's not good enough they had better get back to work.

anythings possible , I read it somewhere.

When we realise that their whole house of cards comes crashing down.

If any trade deal comes with free movement there will be no trade deal.

There should also be no payments.

Yes, dave1357 is right. When he puts it like that, he reason for the deadlock becomes clear to everyone.