Divorced UK and EU head for new Brexit fight over N Ireland

Brussels, Oct 13 (BUS): Late last Christmas Eve, the European Union and Britain finally reached a Brexit trade deal after years of wrangling, threats and missed deadlines to finalize their divorce.

There was hope that the now separated Britain and the 27-nation bloc in their relationship could sail toward calmer waters, the Associated Press reported.

With Christmas approaching once again, one thing is clear – it just wouldn’t have been.

On Tuesday, the Brexit minister accused the European Union of wishing for failure to its former member, and of cursing the United Kingdom as a country that cannot be trusted. David Frost said during a speech in Lisbon that the EU “doesn’t always seem to want us to succeed” or “get back to constructive work together”.

He said that rewriting the mutually agreed divorce agreement was the only way to repair the “cracked relationship” between the former spouses. He warned that Britain could hit the emergency bypass button on the deal if it doesn’t get what it wants.

“We are constantly faced with public accusations that we cannot be trusted and that we are not a reasonable international actor” – in response to EU allegations that the UK is seeking to roll back the legally binding treaty it negotiated and signed, Frost added.

Post-Brexit tensions have crystallized into a worsening fight over Northern Ireland, the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with an EU country, Ireland. Under the most sensitive and controversial part of the Brexit deal, Northern Ireland remains within the EU’s single market for trade in goods, in order to avoid a difficult border with EU member Ireland.

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This means that customs and border checks must be carried out on some goods bound for Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK, despite the fact that they are part of the same country. The regulations aim to prevent goods from Britain from entering the EU’s duty-free single market while maintaining open borders on the island of Ireland – a key pillar of the Northern Ireland peace process.

The UK government quickly complained that the arrangements were not feasible, saying the rules impose onerous red tape on businesses. 2021 is not without a war metaphor, as it did bring about the ‘Sausage War’, with Britain asking the European Union to repeal a ban on British processed meat products such as sausages entering Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s British unionist community says the Brexit deal undermines the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – which sought to protect the rights of both unionists and Irish nationalists – by weakening Northern Ireland’s links with the rest of the UK.

The bloc has agreed to consider changes to the protocol and is due to present its proposals on Wednesday. Prior to the move, Britain raised the stakes again, with Frost calling for drastic changes to the way the deal was managed.

In his speech in the Portuguese capital, Frost said the protocol was “not working”.

“It has completely lost consent in one community in Northern Ireland,” he said. “It is not doing the thing it is set up to do – protecting the Belfast (Good Friday) Convention. In fact it is doing the opposite. It has to change.”

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Most controversially, the EU should also remove the European Court of Justice as the final arbiter of Northern Ireland’s trade-related disputes and instead agree to international arbitration. He said the EU court’s role “means that the EU can make laws that apply in Northern Ireland without any kind of democratic scrutiny or discussion”.

The EU is unlikely to agree to the change. The bloc’s highest court is seen as the pinnacle of the single market for free trade, and Brussels has vowed not to undermine its own regime.

Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, said Britain’s request was “difficult to accept”.

“I don’t think we could have a situation where we would have another court decide what the single market rules are,” he said.

Some EU watchers say Britain’s demand to remove court oversight shows it is not serious about making the Brexit deal work.

Frost repeated the UK’s threat to invoke Article 16, a clause that allows either side to suspend the agreement in exceptional circumstances. This would send already strained relations into a deep freeze and could lead to a trade war between Britain and the bloc – a war that would hurt the UK’s economy more than its much larger neighbour.

The small but symbolically charged topic of fish, which held up a trade deal until the last minute last year, is now dividing.

France wants its EU partners to act as one if London does not give more licenses to small French fishing boats to roam near the UK’s crown dependencies in Jersey and Guernsey, off the French coast of Normandy.

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In the French Parliament last week, Prime Minister Jean Castex accused Britain of reneging on its promise to hunt.

“We see in the clearest way possible that Great Britain is not honoring its signature,” he said.

In a relationship in which both parties often fall back on clichés about the other, Castex was reminiscing about the centuries-old French humiliation of “the treacherous Albion,” a nation that can never be trusted.

Across the English Channel, Brexit supporters often portray a complicit union, damaged by Britain’s departure, doing its best to make Brexit less than a success by throwing up bureaucratic hurdles.

“He entered the EU and we are in a low equilibrium, (a) a somewhat fractured relationship,” Frost admitted. “It doesn’t always have to be like this, but…it takes two to fix it.”

RAE

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