27 April 2022

FT: UK prepared to ‘unilaterally’ tear up Northern Ireland post-Brexit trade deal

The UK government is prepared to tear up the post-Brexit deal governing trade in Northern Ireland, a senior minister in Boris Johnson’s government has warned. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, told a committee of MPs that if the EU did not reform the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol then the UK government was within its rights to take unilateral action. “We signed it [the protocol] on the basis that it would be reformed,” Rees-Mogg said, “And there comes a point where we say, ‘You haven’t reformed it and therefore we are reforming it ourselves’.”

The threat to take unilateral action echoes a move by Johnson’s government in 2020 to disapply parts of the protocol in UK law — an action the government admitted would have breached international law in a “specific and limited way” and precipitated legal action from Brussels.

Differences over the implementation of the protocol have poisoned EU-UK relations since London left the bloc in January 2020. The deal agreed by Johnson in October 2019 created a trade border in the Irish Sea and left Northern Ireland following EU rules for goods trade, in order to avoid a return to a hard border on the island of Ireland. Attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with the EU to soften the protocol have so far failed to make progress, ratcheting up tensions between London and Brussels and leading a growing number of pro-Brexit MPs to demand the UK government repudiate the protocol altogether.

Under questioning from Brexit-supporting MPs on the EU scrutiny committee, Rees-Mogg said the UK had the sovereign right to override the deal. “The United Kingdom is much more important than any agreement we have with any foreign power. That must be the case,” he said. Rees-Mogg declined to provide details of the government’s plans, citing the sensitivities of May’s local elections in Northern Ireland where the protocol has been rejected by all pro-UK Unionist parties, but he added that “wheels are in motion”...

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