EU chief flies in to seal Brexit deal as revolt brews
Tory MPS issue warning over European court’s role and insist accord is put to vote
THE president of the European Commission will fly into London today to finalise a new Brexit deal with Rishi Sunak, despite warnings from Tory MPS that they will revolt if European judges retain a say over Northern Ireland.
The Prime Minister will have talks with Ursula von der Leyen this afternoon, and the pair are expected to hold a press conference to announce the deal before it is then put to Parliament.
However, Tory Eurosceptics and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) warned last night that they would not back a deal unless EU law is “expunged” from Northern Ireland, something they fear Mr Sunak’s agreement will fail to do.
There is also concern that Downing Street has yet to explicitly confirm that MPS will be given a vote on the deal.
The frustrations are caused by the fact that Brexiteers feel they have been left in the dark during the talks.
One Eurosceptic MP said Downing Street had kept them and colleagues out of the loop because it wanted to “set everything up” and present the deal to MPS as “a fait accompli”.
Another said that even members of the Cabinet appeared to be unaware of the details of the deal, comparing No10’s approach to the secrecy of Theresa May’s administration.
Mr Sunak is expected to unveil the proposals without the explicit endorsement of the DUP, whose lawyers will scrutinise its text line-by-line before deciding whether it meets the seven tests they have laid out, including the protection of UK sovereignty.
Today Lord Howard, a former Tory leader, and leading Brexiteer, will urge Tory MPS to back the deal even if it is rejected by the DUP and contains some limited role for the ECJ going forward to help make Brexit a success.
He said it would “ease the problems which are causing so much frustration in Northern Ireland, remove one of the main obstacles to an improved relationship with the EU and help to make Brexit the success we all want it to be”.
Today’s talks mark the culmination of two years of negotiations over how to reform the Northern Ireland Protocol.
It prevented a hard border between the province and the Republic of Ireland post-brexit, but created a border in the Irish Sea with thousands of inspections and document checks on goods coming from Britain.
Ms von der Leyen and Mr Sunak are expected to meet in Windsor, Berkshire, after reports that the revised deal could be called the Windsor Agreement. It emerged on Friday that originally she was going to have tea with the King over the weekend, but the plan was dropped.
The meeting was agreed after talks between Mr Sunak and Ms von der Leyen yesterday. He also met Steve Baker, the Eurosceptic Ulster minister, who said he was ready to quit if he was not convinced by the deal.
Mr Baker was photographed giving the thumbs-up as he left No10 but refused to comment.
After today’s meeting with Ms von der Leyen, Mr Sunak, along with James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, and Chris Heaton-harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary, will update the Cabinet.
No10 said “if a final deal is agreed”,
‘The deal will ease the problems that are causing so much frustration in Northern Ireland’
Mr Sunak and Ms von der Leyen would then hold a joint press conference late afternoon before he heads to the Commons to make a statement on the agreement.
Downing Street said that the talks aimed to ensure the deal fixed “practical problems on the ground”, made trade flow freely within the UK, safeguarded Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and returned sovereignty to people in the province.
Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, insisted yesterday that the deal would “substantially scale back” the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), reduce regulatory checks on trade across the Irish Sea and give the Northern Ireland assembly a bigger say in new EU laws.
However, his comments indicated that oversight of the ECJ would not be abandoned, as leading Brexiteers and the DUP have urged. Mr Raab suggested
that goods destined for Northern Ireland from the UK would not undergo regulatory checks and would instead be subject to “market surveillance”, where the EU has live access to a database of consignments.
“If we can scale back some of the regulatory checks that apply and some of the paperwork, that would in itself involve a significant scaling back with the role of ECJ,” Mr Raab told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News.
Mr Raab also appeared to confirm suggestions that Mr Sunak has negotiated a means by which the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast will be given pre-legislative scrutiny of new EU laws so that they can be disapplied if necessary. He said the UK was looking for a “democratic arrangement” where Stormont would have the “last word” on new EU rules.
“We need to make sure that if there are any new rules in the future, there’s a proper democratic check and a proper democratic check coming out of the institutions in Stormont,” he added.
The DUP and Eurosceptic MPS suggested last night that Mr Sunak’s deal looked unlikely to go far enough to assuage their concerns. DUP MP Sammy Wilson said it was a “red line” for his party that “no EU law” should continue to apply in Northern Ireland.
“Not only are we given those laws and have imposed those laws on us at present, but they’re imposed without any say either by British ministers or by politicians in Northern Ireland,” he said.
Ian Paisley Jr, his fellow MP, warned that there should be no rush for a deal to reach a deadline as he warned Mr Sunak that “if his plan involves keeping any part of the Protocol, the DUP will not be going back into power-sharing. This is about who governs, who makes the laws – us or the EU? There must be no surrender.”
Priti Patel, the former home secretary, said: “It’s not about green and red lanes, it’s about, fundamentally, the efficacy and integrity of the UK in ensuring Northern Ireland is absolutely free of EU law and EU regulations.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said: “What isn’t happening is that there is literally no change to the fact that Northern Ireland is going to be forced to be under the ECJ and EU law and regulations. I don’t see how the DUP can come into power-sharing.”
Mark Francois, chairman of the hardline European Research Group (ERG), said that they wanted EU law “expunged” from Northern Ireland.