EU hits back after UK moves to change post-Brexit trade rules

Euro News ^

[FarCenter]

The EU has threatened to use "all the measures at its disposal" after the United Kingdom signalled it would introduce legislation to change the post-Brexit status of Northern Ireland.

Britain says its move to change the legally binding treaty — an apparent breach of international law — is an insurance policy in case it can’t reach an agreement with the bloc to end a long-running dispute over post-Brexit trade rules.

...

The announcement drew a sharp response from the EU, which has long accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson of trying to wriggle out of a deal that his government negotiated and signed as part of the U.K.’s exit from the bloc in 2020. The spat raises the chances of a trade war between Britain and the 27-nation bloc that is — even after Brexit — its major economic partner.

Britain's Conservative government says post-Brexit trade rules -- which London signed up to -- are hurting the economy and undermining peace in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK that shares a border with an EU member state.

When Britain left the bloc and its borderless free-trade zone, a deal was agreed to keep the Irish land border free of customs posts and other checks, because an open border is a key pillar of the peace process that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland.

Instead, to protect the EU’s single market, there are checks on some goods, such as meat and eggs, entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.

The arrangement is opposed by British unionists in Northern Ireland, who say the new checks have put a burden on businesses and frayed the bonds between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

The Democratic Unionist Party, Northern Ireland’s biggest unionist party, is blocking the formation of a new power-sharing regional government in Belfast until the checks are scrapped.

[Da_Shrimp]

All part of dear old Boris' Oven Ready Deal.

What a farce.

[Savage Rider]

Sounds like N. Ireland wants the benefits of the EU without being in the EU. There’s a reason right there for unifying the island.

[MalPearce]

That’s one interpretation.

Another is, the free trade zone between all four countries in the UK, and the Republic, has existed far longer than the EEC’s free trade area. Dublin is the party that insists on having its cake and eating it - by insisting there has to be a customs border between GB and RoI, despite not wanting that the border to be located between it and the North. Because that has to stay open.

It’s an irrational imposition hiven the EU knows 99.99% of all UK standards remain completely unchanged since Brexit. If we’d suddenly binned those standards then there’d be a point to it; as we haven’t it’s just an artificial creation of a customs border that serves no purpose.

[Winniesboy]

The protocol nonsense could have been avoided even more easily had Teresa May accepted the EU’s offer to leave the entire UK in the customs union, even though out of the EU and its single market - an arrangement which appears to work, problem-free, with eg Turkey. But the offer was rejected on the grounds that it would be a permanent obstacle to the Holy Grail of a US/UK trade deal. Now that we have a wonderful US/UK trade deal, we’re stuck with the protocol...um....oh. Ah.