11 December 2021

FT: UK offers big concession over Northern Ireland trading relations

Boris Johnson’s government has this week offered a significant climbdown in talks with the EU over post-Brexit trading relations in Northern Ireland, as the prime minister tries to end the toxic dispute. 

A senior British official on Friday briefed London-based EU journalists that Johnson was no longer seeking the immediate axing of the European Court of Justice from its role in enforcing the so-called Northern Ireland protocol. In a move described as “an important shift”, the UK official said “no one is demonstrating on the streets of Belfast” in protest against the role of the ECJ.

The protocol is the part of the UK’s Brexit deal that aims to maintain an open border in Ireland. In exchange, some checks on east-west trade across the Irish Sea are needed. Although Johnson wants to settle the “governance” issue of the protocol in the longer term, EU journalists were briefed that the prime minister wants to focus for now on securing the smooth flow of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland across the Irish Sea. “If the negotiations fail it won’t be because the UK is insisting on taking the ECJ out of the protocol,” the official said, adding that London accepted that the European Commission did not have a mandate from member states to discuss the excision of the court from the deal.

According to journalists at the briefing, they had been summoned specifically to report the “shift” in UK government thinking — an olive branch that could help broker a deal with Brussels. But when accounts of the briefing started to emerge, Downing Street desperately attempted to play down what had been said, fearing it had undermined the negotiating position of Brexit minister Lord David Frost....

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