Johnson calls for ‘efficient’ exit from customs union after one year
BORIS JOHNSON has said that Britain needs to leave the customs union with “speed and efficiency” after Brexit amid a new Cabinet row.
The UK has committed to retaining membership of a temporary customs union after Brexit to reduce barriers to trade. However, the Government has refused to say how long it will last.
The Foreign Secretary indicated in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he supported ending the transition period within a year.
He said: “There’s the customs union transition period, where there’s a discussion about how long that will go – one, two, three years, how you would run that. My view is that we should get on. What business would want us to achieve is speed and efficiency.”
David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, have both suggested that it should last for two years. Mr Johnson also appeared to concede that the UK could pay some form of Brexit divorce bill after previously saying that the European Commission could “go whistle” for sums as large as £100billion. He said “we are bill-paying people”, adding that the UK would meet its “legal obligations”.
He added that Donald Trump would make a state visit to the UK next year despite condemning his comments over violence in Charlottesville as “totally wrong”. He said: “I thought he got it totally wrong. It was a great shame that he failed to make a clear fast distinction between anti-fascists and Nazis.”
It also emerged that the Foreign Secretary told Libyan politicians not to make the same “mistake” as Theresa May by calling an early election. Libya is deeply divided with two rival Parliaments and four governments.
Mr Johnson was speaking after a visit to Libya in which he urged the nation’s political leaders to set aside their differences. He told Libya’s Un-backed prime minister Fayez al-sarraj that the June election, called by Mrs May amid Tory hopes of a landslide victory, had not gone “entirely to plan”, according to the BBC. He said the Tories had been given “a bit of a lesson, which is that if you are going to have elections, you have got to get ready”.
In an interview with the BBC’S diplomatic correspondent James Landale, Mr Johnson added: “We have been telling [Libyan politicians] about what it takes to fight an election, warning them about the pitfalls in calling elections too soon or whatever, which is one of the risks they face because they haven’t got their ducks lined up properly.”