Boris Johnson is coming under pressure from Washington to end his stand-off with Brussels over Northern Ireland, as Joe Biden prepares to hold St Patrick’s day talks with Irish premier Micheál Martin.
On the eve of the talks, Washington lawmakers published a resolution warning they would oppose any UK-US trade deal unless the British prime minister upheld the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.
Meanwhile, Martin has said he hopes the US president, who declared last year “I’m Irish”, will use his influence to calm post-Brexit tensions between the UK and the EU and to secure the “right outcomes” in Northern Ireland.
“We want to see a continuation of the president’s interest in Ireland and support for the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement and also of upholding the Brexit agreement itself,” Martin told CBS ahead of his virtual talks with Biden.
The EU this week started legal action against Britain after Johnson authorised a unilateral easing of rules governing trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, allegedly in breach of the UK’s Brexit treaty with the bloc.
Johnson denies that Britain acted unlawfully and said he was acting to smooth trade across the Irish Sea, by extending “grace periods” that ease the impact of Brexit red tape on Northern Irish businesses.
But some in Brussels fear Johnson secretly wants to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol, which sets up controls at Irish Sea ports to check goods that might enter the EU single market over the open land border on the island of Ireland.
While that would please pro-UK unionist politicians in Northern Ireland, who dislike any border between the region and Great Britain, it would alarm nationalists, the Irish government and Biden, because it would raise the spectre of possible controls on the island of Ireland.
Neither the EU nor Dublin would accept such controls. The cross party resolution by US senators said the reintroduction of “barriers, checkpoints or personnel on the island of Ireland” would “threaten the successes of the Good Friday Agreement”.
The resolution added that any new or amended trade deals between the US and UK should take into account whether the conditions of the Good Friday Agreement are met.
Johnson has insisted he stands by the Northern Ireland protocol, which he negotiated as part of his 2019 Brexit deal to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. He has said it has to operate in the interests of both communities in the region.
The UK government has accused Brussels of dragging its feet in finding solutions to friction on the Irish Sea border — for example in trade involving supermarket goods — such that London has had to act unilaterally.
Lord Peter Mandelson, former Northern Ireland secretary, warned in a letter to the Financial Times that unless the Northern Ireland dispute was solved it could broaden into a corrosive, wider breakdown in relations between London and Brussels.
“The alternative of continuing the present stand off will not only threaten stability in Northern Ireland but the economic and security interests of the UK and EU as a whole for the foreseeable future,” he wrote.
Lord John Kerr, former UK ambassador to Washington and Brussels, said he expected Biden to discreetly send “emissaries” to the Johnson government to urge him to make the Northern Ireland protocol work.
“I would expect the private message to be: ‘Don’t you think this is rather dangerous?’” added Kerr. He said Northern Ireland could be “the leading edge” for a wider “tit-for-tat” dispute between Britain and the EU.
Lord Chris Patten, former Tory party chairman, said Lord David Frost, the UK minister for EU relations, had made things worse through heavy-handed work on the Northern Ireland question.
“This requires diplomacy which doesn’t assume that the best way to do origami is with a blowtorch,” he added.
Frost announced the extension of the grace periods for the flow of certain goods across the Irish Sea and only telephoned his EU counterpart, Maros Sefcovic, later. “Diplomacy is obviously not something that interests David Frost,” said Patten.
British officials admitted that Johnson’s appointment of the abrasive Frost, previously the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator, to his sensitive new role was seen in Brussels as “an aggressive move”, but insisted that was not the intention.
They said the unilateral move to extend the grace periods was notified at official level to Brussels in advance. “It wasn’t an attempt to dial things up,” added one official. “We want a normal relationship and make sure the situation is as normal as it can be.”
Another UK official said there had been no representations from the White House about the row over the Northern Ireland protocol.
Letter in response to this article:
UK and EU must rebuild trust by defusing Irish customs row / From Peter Mandelson, House of Lords, London SW1, UK
Source: Economy - ft.com
