Britain wants a deal – but not at any price

FROM all the sound and fury yesterday, anyone would think Boris Johnson had ripped up the eU withdrawal agreement and was wantonly jeopardising peace in Ireland.

Sinn Fein spoke of ‘ a treacherous betrayal’. One member of the Irish parliament said he was ‘trading peace for state aid and fisheries’. Chief eU negotiator Michel Barnier suggested the issue could see his team walking away from talks.

In fact, the new Commons Bill at the heart of the row, designed to secure the ‘seamless functioning’ of trade within the UK after our eU withdrawal, looks to be pretty small beer.

here is the gist. Under the northern Ireland Protocol we are committed (deal or no Deal) to carrying out customs checks on goods travelling between mainland Britain and the province, which would effectively remain in the Single Market.

These checks are to be made before the products reach the island of Ireland, removing the need for a hard Irish border.

Goods which are to be sold on into the wider eU will need a customs declaration. Those which are destined for sale within the UK only will not.

none of this will change. But crucially, the Bill says it will be for the UK unilaterally to decide which goods require a declaration ( and possibly tariffs in the event of no Deal) and which do not.

Although the Bill does not materially alter the protocol, the fact that it was drawn up without consultation has rattled Brussels.

With talks due to resume today, the timing looks to have been quite deliberate.

It follows a defiant interview at the weekend in which the UK’s chief negotiator Lord Frost said Britain would not allow itself to become a ‘client state’. Then yesterday Mr Johnson publicly suggested that no Deal could be ‘a good outcome’.

The Prime Minister is sending out a bold message that he will not be pushed around in these negotiations. Unlike Theresa May with her fragile minority government he has an 80-seat majority and was elected on a promise to ‘get Brexit done’.

he wants to strike a deal and this paper certainly hopes he can. But he will not sign up to the eU’s regulatory regime in order to secure one. Brussels must understand this, or no Deal seems inevitable.

Disruptive as that would be for this country, for the Irish Republic and other eU countries which rely on export sales to Britain, it would be a catastrophe. The ball is in their court.