Liz Truss, the frontrunner in the race to replace Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister, is poised to trigger Article 16, suspending the Northern Ireland protocol, as one of her government’s first acts.
The move would set the tone for fresh disputes and cold relations between London and Brussels.
UK officials say that the threshold for suspending the protocol has already been met, which allows either side to take emergency measures if the protocol causes “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist,” or “diversion of trade.”
Under Johnson’s leadership, relations between London and Brussels become increasingly strained and the Northern Ireland protocol, which Johnson negotiated and agreed to, has been a key point of dispute. The protocol introduced customs checks on products arriving in Northern Ireland from Britain in order to avoid a hard customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, that has effectively carved out Northern Ireland from the UK’s own internal market.
The prospects of EU-UK relations improving under Johnson’s successor look slim.
Despite only narrowly making it into the top two candidates selected by Conservative MPs to go to the membership ballot, Truss has emerged as the heavy favourite to defeat her rival, former chancellor Rishi Sunak, in the poll of the roughly 160,000 members of the Conservative party. The deadline for voting is 2 September.
While Truss campaigned for ‘Remain’ ahead of the 2016 referendum, she has sought to outflank Sunak in her enthusiasm for Brexit and euroscepticism.
At a campaign hustings event on Thursday, Truss said that it was unclear whether French President Emmanuel Macron was a “friend or foe” to the UK, prompting Macron to retort that the UK was “a friend, strong and allied, whoever its leaders are and sometimes in spite of the leaders and the small mistakes they can make in their speeches”.
Suspending the protocol, which is opposed by the pro-British unionist community in Northern Ireland, would also be a popular move among Conservative MPs.
The push to suspend the protocol has also been given more momentum this week after the UK tax office warned steel manufacturers that they would face a 25% tariff if they export to Northern Ireland because of changes to EU customs rules.
As foreign secretary, in June, she tabled the bill that seeks to unilaterally override the protocol. The bill has majority support in the House of Commons but is likely to be heavily amended by the House of Lords where the Conservatives do not have a majority.
That could force the government to invoke the Parliament Act to reject, meaning that the bill could not be passed into law before the end of the year. Triggering Article 16 would offer a ‘stop-gap’ solution until the bill is adopted, say UK officials.
David Frost, the pugnacious former civil servant who emerged as Johnson’s chief advisor and then as Brexit minister, is also being tipped to return to a senior ministerial post should Truss win the leadership election.
Earlier this month, the UK launched dispute proceedings against the European Commission over the long-running stalemate that has kept UK universities and researchers shut out of the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe research programme, two years after agreeing to participate as part of the Brexit agreement.
The Commission had tied Horizon Europe access to the resolution of the protocol issue, a stance which UK officials have described as “wrong and dubious” and as “a destructive way of approaching the relationship”.
Meanwhile, the European Commission has opened four new legal proceedings against Britain over London’s failure to implement the protocol.
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
