The British government has confirmed that it will introduce legislation next week to unilaterally override the Northern Ireland protocol. The Bill is expected to give ministers the power to abolish the protocol’s system of checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and to remove the EU’s role in state aid and VAT policy in the North.
Some of the 148 Conservative MPs who voted no confidence in Boris Johnson’s leadership on Monday have threatened to join Labour and other opposition parties in voting against the Bill. The government has promised to publish a summary of its legal advice showing the legislation will not be in breach of international law.
The Bill has been delayed amid disagreements within Mr Johnson’s government over how far it should go in ripping up the agreement he negotiated less than three years ago. Labour leader Keir Starmer said on Friday the legislation would be an impediment to progress in negotiations between Britain and the EU.
“When I think of all the issues, all the challenges that have been overcome in the last 20 years I don’t think that the remaining issues of the protocol are incapable of resolution,” he told the BBC.
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Former Northern Ireland secretary and European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson told an Ireland Funds lunch in London that although Brexit had created problems for Northern Ireland that cannot be solved, they could be managed.
“We have a prime minister who won office because he opposed a Brexit relationship that could have worked. It is highly likely that the same prime minister signed up to the current arrangements in bad faith. It is certain that he has consistently failed to tell the truth about them,” he said.
“But both the British government and the EU should have known, and probably did know, that this protocol if implemented strictly — and there is room for interpretation — was never going to work for Northern Ireland. It was always unlikely to survive contact with reality and therefore requires deftness in its application.”
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Lord Mandelson said there was a landing zone that would work for Northern Ireland if both Britain and the EU were willing to compromise. But he acknowledged that finding a solution would be easier if Britain agreed to align with EU plant, animal and food safety standards.
“This, as the EU has offered, would remove a big part of the barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Britain that unionists find so painful, as well as for trade in those goods between Britain and the EU 27. This is not an easy choice for the UK — letting an outside power determine an area of regulation for you — but the benefits would be big,” he said.
In the House of Lords on Friday, peers questioned one of the government’s law officers about reports that its independent barrister had been told not to give his opinion on whether the planned protocol Bill will breach international law. The government has refused to confirm or deny the reports.
