Fears are growing that the UK is preparing to walk away from Brexit talks as one of the European commission’s top officials arrives in London for an emergency meeting with Michael Gove.
The two spoke on Wednesday night by phone but Maroš Šefčovič asked for Thursday’s urgent meeting for a “face to face” explanation for the government’s proposal to breach international law and “disapply” some of the Northern Ireland Brexit arrangements in the event of no trade deal.
Brexit talks resumed on Tuesday but nosedived after it emerged that the UK was planning to row back on some of the Northern Ireland protocol through a section inserted into the internal market bill published on Wednesday.
Gove and Šefčovič will meet privately before a full extraordinary meeting of the EU-UK joint committee, which they both chair, which was set up to implement the withdrawal agreement in all its parts including the Northern Ireland protocol.
Brussels has accused Boris Johnson of deliberately endangering the talks with unconfirmed reports circulating in Westminster that the UK is prepared to walk away sooner rather than later.
Šefčovič told reporters on Wednesday night the UK was aware that a lack of respect for the withdrawal agreement would have consequences and said that trust in the UK was a prerequisite for talks continuing.
“For us this is of course a matter of principle,” he said.
And the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, said there were now “justifiable doubts” as to whether the UK wanted to conclude trade negotiations at all.
On Sunday Johnson said that if there was no deal by 15 October then both sides should “accept that and move on”.
He said that the UK would then trade with the EU like Australia, which does not have a deal with the bloc, describing that as “a good outcome for the UK”.
Brussels is now alive to the notion that the internal market bill, which the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, admitted would breach the law, was designed to collapse the talks.
“Our colleagues in Europe, in particular those conducting the negotiations, are now wondering whether the will is there or not to arrive at a conclusion and get an agreement – and that is a very serious issue,” Martin told the Financial Times in Dublin.
The EU is now studying the possibility of legal action under the withdrawal agreement.
Adding to the tension, sources said the European commission was entirely blindsided by the internal market bill with no notice provided of the changes the government was looking to make to the withdrawal agreement.
The British attitude to the issues of state aid notifications and export declarations had been a concern to EU representatives sitting on the joint committee, according to sources in Brussels. But there had been no indication of the scale of the changes the UK would seek to make.
One senior EU diplomat said: “In four years of negotiations this is the absolute low. They could at least have tried to fudge it.
“UK ministers are getting the powers to overrule not only international but also national law? By now we’re well used to seeing this in other parts of the world but Britain?
“We still strive to come to an agreement within the limited time that remains as the basis for future relations. The importance of a functioning governance clause has only increased after the last couple of days.”
In a letter to the Times on Thursday, Lord Garnier QC, the former Tory solicitor general, suggested government law officers, including the attorney general, Suella Braverman, should quit.
“The admission by the Northern Ireland secretary that the government is prepared to break the law is shocking, if sadly no longer surprising,” he wrote. “Sir Jonathan Jones … has resigned as Treasury solicitor rather than countenance being party to such conduct. He was right to do so. But if he has resigned, why are the law officers still in post?”
The paper also reports that the government’s top legal officer, the Treasury solicitor Jonathan Jones, quit this week after clashing with Braverman.
source https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/10/fears-grow-that-uk-is-preparing-to-quit-brexit-talks
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