09 October 2018

Financial Times: Raab vows to curtail keeping UK in customs union

Britain will not sign up to any Brexit deal that leaves it locked in the EU customs union indefinitely and unable to strike its own trade deals, Dominic Raab, Brexit secretary, has told MPs.

Mr Raab said in a House of Commons statement on Tuesday that any extension of Britain’s participation in the customs union— seen as key to guaranteeing no hard border in Ireland — would have to be “temporary, limited and finite”.

His comments aimed to allay concerns among Conservative Eurosceptic MPs that a solution to the Irish border question is not a backdoor route for keeping Britain tied to the customs union, possibly beyond the next election scheduled for 2022.

But Mr Raab’s statement will have to be reconciled with an insistence in Brussels that a final deal would have to provide a lasting guarantee that Brexit will not result in a return to a hard north-south border in Ireland. [...]

Mr Raab told Tory MPs that if Britain did remain tied to the customs union for a limited period after the transition deal expires, the UK still wanted to create a new customs relationship — based on new technology — that allowed it to strike its own trade deals.

Asked if the EU would have the final say on whether Britain should be allowed to move to this new system, Mr Raab said: “We could never allow any third party, in this case the EU, to have a lock on the process.”

The leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party has insisted after a meeting with Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, that she would not accept any Brexit deal that treated the territory differently to the rest of the UK. Speaking in Brussels, Arlene Foster told journalists her only “red line” in the talks was a solution that meant Northern Ireland was “treated differently in customs or constitutionally”. [...]

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)

Dominic Raab remarks

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