Northern Ireland Protocol: what is the UK government up to?

The UK’s Brexit minister will urge the European Commission today to bend its rules on the Northern Ireland Protocol and end the European Court of Justice’s role in the arrangement.

Speaking in Lisbon, David Frost is expected to warn that Brussels would be making a “historic misjudgement” in refusing to make further concessions on the post-Brexit trade deal that he negotiated last year.

Frost’s speech will “kick-start a pivotal week” in discussions over the future of Northern Ireland, said The Telegraph. His EU counterpart, Maros Sefcovic, is due to put forward proposals from the bloc tomorrow.

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Meat of the matter

Frost has admitted that the protocol - which effectively created a checks border in the Irish Sea to avoid a land border on the island of Ireland - is not working out as planned. He has accused the EU of treating products coming into Northern Ireland as if they were “crossing an EU external frontier, with the full panoply of checks and controls”.

This alleged inflexibility has triggered rows over imports of goods including medicines, live animals and, in what was dubbed the “sausage wars”, chilled meats.

Frost was expected to argue today that the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in governing the arrangement has created a major imbalance in the way the protocol operates.

And if the two sides fail to move forward in the coming weeks, Frost has suggested that he might trigger Article 16, an option of last resort that enables one side to suspend parts of the protocol altogether.

Red lines

In a “late-night Twitter spat” on Saturday, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney accused Frost of “laying out red lines he knew the EU could not accept, to deliberately engineer ‘a breakdown in relations’” before this week’s crunch talks had even begun, reported the i news site.

Coveney told RTE radio yesterday: “When David Frost accuses me of raising issues on social media, it’s a bit rich, quite frankly. He is briefing British media to say: ‘The EU can make the changes they need to make, but it’s not enough. We want more.’”

Trade war

Brussels’ chief negotiator Sefcovic is expected to announce “far-reaching” proposals tomorrow that include offering to drop many checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland. But around half will still remain, “a situation considered intolerable by the UK government and the Democratic Unionist party, which is part of Northern Ireland’s administration”, said the Financial Times (FT).

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has already threatened to leave the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive as early as this month if the protocol is not scrapped.

The UK and the EU have “edged closer to a trade war” after the European Commission insisted on Sunday that the ECJ oversight must continue, said the paper, with Coveney’s latest comments “raising the temperature further”.

An EU diplomat told the FT that it was “very disturbing that the UK still does not do enough to implement the agreement and pretends not to have known the consequences of an agreement it wanted, negotiated, signed and ratified in the first place”.

“Friends and allies don’t treat each other like that,” the unnamed insider added.