The Scotsman

All in good faith

-

It is sad that self-described Remainer Allan Sutherland seeks to ascribe bad faith to the EU (Letters, 25 April). The reality is that, after lengthy negotiatio­ns, the UK and the EU finalised an agreement on 14 November last year. This was signed off by all 28 EU government­s, including the UK Government, in the following days and formally endorsed at a special European Council meeting on 25 November.

At that point the agreement ceased to be a draft and became the Withdrawal Agreement, and from then on was described as such not just by the EU but also by the UK government.

It is a widely held axiom in intra-eu negotiatio­ns that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. But that point came last November. And an obvious corollary is that it is not open to any one member to seek to unpick parts of an agreement once “everything is agreed”.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me to say that all that has followed since November is a UK problem, not an EU one.

Far from acting in bad faith, the EU seems to be doing everything it can to help us reach a political solution while respecting the terms of the mutually agreed Withdrawal Agreement.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom