Fox: We’ll talk about Irish border after EU trade deal

LIAM Fox ramped up the pressure on Brussels last night as he warned there would be no agreement on the Irish border until the UK and EU have reached a trade deal.

The International Trade Secretary indicated that Britain would not meet the EU’s ten-day deadline to resolve the border issue before trade talks can start.

He said a final position on Ireland could not be reached until it was known what the ‘end state’ of the UK-EU relationship after Brexit would be.

And he blamed Brussels for the slow progress of negotiations, saying the European Commission was too obsessed with ‘ever closer union’ to compromise.

It came as former cabinet minister Owen Paterson accused Irish politicians of trying to ‘blackmail’ the UK over the issue of how to maintain the current ‘soft’ border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic after Brexit.

The Irish government is adamant there should not be a ‘ hard’ border and is putting pressure on the Government to accept a solution whereby either the whole of the UK or just Northern Ireland remains in the EU’s customs union and the single market.

However, the Democratic Unionist Party does not want the province to have to stay in the customs union or single market for the sake of maintaining a soft border if the rest of the UK withdraws.

Former Northern Ireland secretary Mr Paterson said yesterday there should be no question of the province leaving the ‘single market of the UK’ to meet Irish government demands. He accused some politicians of trying to ‘force and blackmail the UK into giving a special status to Northern Ireland outside the rest of the UK’.

Dr Fox also rejected the Irish proposal, saying: ‘We don’t want there to be a hard border but the UK is going to be leaving the customs union and the single market.

‘We have always had exceptions for Ireland… but we can’t come to a final answer to the Irish question until we get an idea of the end state. And until we get into discussions with the EU on the end state that will be very difficult, so the quicker that we can do that the better and we are still in a position where the EU doesn’t want to do that.’

Dr Fox’s comments on Sky News align with the official Downing Street position that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’.

The UK hopes Brexit talks will move on to trade after a meeting of EU leaders on December 14-15.

Britain is by far Ireland’s most important European trading partner. The Irish sold the UK £11.3billion of goods in the first nine months of this year, according the Office for National Statistics.

Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness told BBC’s Sunday Politics: ‘I hope the UK is not holding the Irish situation to ransom – it is far too serious and far too critical.’

Any arrangement giving Northern Ireland a separate status would be strongly resisted by the DUP, whose ten MPs are in effect keeping Mrs May in Downing Street after she lost her majority in the general election.

DUP leader Arlene Foster told her party conference on Saturday: ‘We will not support any arrangements that create barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK or any suggestion that Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the UK, will have to mirror European regulations.’

World Trade Organisation director general Roberto Azevedo said yesterday trade with the EU would not stop in the absence of an agreement. He told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘It’s not the end of the world if the UK trades under WTO rules with the EU.’

‘They are trying to blackmail the UK’