Johnson ready to ‘rip up’ NI Brexit deal

BORIS JOHNSON could be just weeks away from ripping up the UK’s post-Brexit agreement with the EU over Northern Ireland to avoid an eruption of violence in the summer marching season.

Brexit minister David Frost signals in today’s Irish Mail on Sunday that if Brussels continues to insist on checks on goods arriving from Britain, the UK government could trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to suspend the checks. No 10 fears that unless it takes such action, unionist violence could flare during the July marching season.

Urging Brussels to ‘stop the point-scoring and work with us’, Mr Frost says the UK’s ‘European friends’ did not appear to share its desire for ‘free trade and friendly relations’. He writes: ‘From the unfortunate attempt to put a hard border on the island of Ireland for vaccine exports, to the threats to cut off electricity to Jersey or to retaliate against our financial services, we haven’t always heard much enthusiasm to make things work.’

Mr Frost says he saw the problems caused by EU checks at Belfast’s Arcadia delicatessen, writing: ‘Its shoppers have always been able to choose from a variety of goods… artisan jams, to pork pies, to Norfolk sausages, from all over the UK.’

But he warns that suppliers in the rest of the UK are stopping deliveries to such stores as it is ‘too difficult and too time-consuming to deal with the paperwork’.

Article 16 gives the UK and the EU unilateral power to suspend parts of the Protocol if its application creates ‘serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade’.

The EU is refusing to budge on the Protocol because it argues that it is a direct consequence of the Brexit Boris Johnson negotiated, and says London should instead align UK food standards with those of the EU. Under Brexit, Northern Ireland observes EU rules on food.