London: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday said he is “over the moon” with the Brexit agreement inked with the European Union (EU) aimed at resolving long-standing trade issues in the region.
Sunak is currently touring Northern Ireland to sell the new “Windsor Framework” agreed between the UK and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor on Monday, which replaces the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol which caused trade disputes and severely strained UK-EU relations.
Sunak later made a statement in the House of Commons to declare that the new deal delivers “free-flowing trade” for UK territory Northern Ireland with the rest of Britain by “removing any sense of the border in the Irish Sea” and creates a red lane system to resolve issues with bordering EU member-state Ireland.
“I’m really pleased in fact, I’m over the moon that yesterday we managed to have a decisive breakthrough with our negotiations with the EU,” Sunak told local business representatives gathered at the Coca-Cola factory in County Antrim in Northern Ireland as he took questions from them on the framework.
“It’s about stability in Northern Ireland. It’s about real people and real businesses. It’s about showing that our Union, which has lasted for centuries, can and will endure. And it’s about breaking down the barriers between us,” he said.
Sunak insisted that the new framework puts the people of Northern Ireland in charge with active democratic consent by adding a new “Stormont Brake”.
This indicates that the devolved Parliament at Stormont in Belfast, backed by the UK, can veto new EU goods laws not supported by all communities in Northern Ireland.
The agreement concluded months of intensive discussions between the UK and EU to address problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol, agreed by former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who was conspicuously absent from the Commons session on Monday, as the Opposition repeatedly criticised his handling of the issue.
In a swipe at Sunak’s former boss, Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer said, “The Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip [Boris Johnson] told the people of Northern Ireland that his protocol meant ‘no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind’ on goods crossing the Irish Sea after Brexit.”
“That was nonsense. A point-blank refusal to engage with unionists in Northern Ireland in good faith, never mind taking their concerns seriously. And it inevitably contributed to the collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland,” Starmer said.
He urged Sunak to be “utterly unlike his predecessor” and not pretend the deal is something it is not.
Overall, Sunak’s statement in parliament was greeted with praise from his Conservative Party MPs and many in the opposition. The reaction of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which had withdrawn from the Northern Irish devolved government process over the Protocol, now remains crucial to the new Windsor Framework working in the long term. While the regional party said it is studying the deal’s fine print before giving its verdict, Sunak’s tour of the region is intended to build consensus on all sides.
“Parties will want to consider the agreement in detail, a process that will need time and care. And there are, of course, many voices and perspectives within Northern Ireland, and it is the job of the government to respect them all,” Sunak said in Parliament.
“As a Conservative, a Brexiteer, and a Unionist, I believe passionately with my head and my heart that it is the right way forward, right for Northern Ireland, and right for our United Kingdom,” he said.
London: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday unveiled a “decisive breakthrough” in achieving a new deal with the European Union (EU) to resolve the post-Brexit trade dispute related to Northern Ireland.
After weeks of intensive negotiations, Sunak was joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for a final set of in-person talks in Windsor, south east England, after which the duo addressed the media to confirm a new “Windsor Framework”.
It replaces the previous Northern Ireland Protocol, agreed by Sunak’s former boss Boris Johnson to prevent a hard border between UK territory Northern Ireland and EU member-state Ireland but eventually proving unworkable and causing much tension between the UK and EU.
“I’m pleased to report that we have now made a decisive breakthrough. Together we have changed the original protocol and are today announcing the new Windsor framework,” Sunak told reporters.
“Today’s agreement delivers smooth-flowing trade within the whole United Kingdom, protects Northern Ireland’s place in our union and safeguards sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland and [removes] any sense of a border in the Irish Sea,” he said.
Von der Leyen echoed Sunak’s optimism to say that the UK and EU can now open a new chapter in their post-Brexit relationship.
They detailed “big steps forward” to deliver trade flow with goods destined for Northern Ireland travelling through a new “green lane” with a separate “red lane” reserved for items expected to move on to the EU.
“We will end the situation where food made to UK rules could not be sent to and sold in Northern Ireland. This means that if food is available on supermarket shelves in Great Britain, then it will be available on supermarket in Northern Ireland,” said Sunak.
The legal text of the Northern Ireland Protocol has been amended to ensure critical VAT and excise changes for the whole of the UK can be made and the devolved Northern
Irish parliament in Stormont would have a say on the changes. “These negotiations have not always been easy, but I’d like to pay an enormous personal tribute to Ursula for her vision in recognising the possibility of a new way forward… Today’s agreement is about preserving that delicate balance and charting a new way forward for the people of Northern Ireland,” added Sunak.
The British Indian leader now faces the uphill task of getting Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on board with the new Windsor Framework.
The DUP had been strongly opposed to the earlier protocol, which meant goods arriving from England, Scotland and Wales within the United Kingdom were checked when they arrived at Northern Irish ports. This was seen as undermining the region’s position within the rest of the UK, besides severely impacting trade.
The other group likely to make things difficult for Sunak in the House of Commons include the hard Brexiteers within the Conservative Party, including backbencher Johnson, who had warned against backing down over Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which would have given the UK Parliament a chance to unilaterally change parts of the protocol.
However, Sunak had indicated that a fresh negotiated agreement with the EU was preferable over the controversial Bill that would have put the UK on a legal collision course with its European neighbours.
DUBLIN — As if political tensions in Northern Ireland weren’t bad enough, Irish Republican Army die-hards unwilling to accept their side’s cease-fire appear determined to make matters worse.
An off-duty police officer is in hospital in a critical condition after being shot several times at close range Wednesday night as he coached a youth football practice on the outskirts of the Northern Irish town of Omagh. No group claimed responsibility, but politicians from all sides agreed that one of the small IRA splinter groups still active in the U.K. region must be to blame.
“The people behind this attack think they’re at war. Well they’re not,” said Colum Eastwood, the moderate Irish nationalist leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Their fight isn’t with any government, any police service or anyone else. It’s with the people of Ireland who have chosen peace. And it’s a fight they will never, never win.”
The last time any of the IRA factions killed a Northern Ireland police officer was in 2011, again in Omagh — also the scene of the deadliest attack of them all, when a Real IRA car bomb killed 29 people in 1998 in hopes of wrecking that year’s Good Friday peace accord.
The largest Irish republican paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 300 officers as part of its own 27-year campaign of shootings and bombings, but laid down its arms in 1997 and surrendered them to foreign disarmament officials in 2005.
That key peacemaking step, required as part of the Good Friday deal, ultimately helped persuade the Democratic Unionist Party to end its opposition to power-sharing and finally form a unity government in 2007 with their Irish republican enemies in Sinn Féin, longtime partners of the Provisional IRA. However, last year the DUP collapsed their coalition as part of its campaign against post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland, a dispute that U.K. and EU negotiators have spent months trying to resolve.
Wednesday night’s shooting brought back grim memories from a generation ago when such violence was a nightly occurrence, an era when militants effectively filled Northern Ireland’s prevailing political vacuum with bloodshed. The Good Friday pact and the cross-community government it spawned were supposed to keep such violence at bay.
With the Stormont parliamentary building shuttered amid Brexit fallout, politicians from all sides briefly spoke with one voice on social media to condemn the officer’s attackers.
“Those responsible for such horror must be brought to justice,” said Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, who has been in the post only since September.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — Rishi Sunak insisted Saturday he wants to “get the job done” on Brexit, promising he was “giving it everything we’ve got” to secure a deal with Brussels.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the British prime minister said he was hopeful of a “positive outcome,” as he launched a weekend media blitz, burnishing his Brexiteer credentials, and reassuring potential critics his deal “should command very broad support, because it ensures the free flow of trade within the United Kingdom’s internal market, it secures Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and it ensures sovereignty.”
Both sides continue to insist a deal to resolve the ongoing tension over Britain’s post-Brexit trading arrangements, which see Northern Ireland continue to follow some EU laws to get round the need for checks at the U.K.’s border with the Republic of Ireland, is not yet done, but could come within days if negotiators are able to close the remaining gaps.
Sunak, who himself backed Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2016, has been trying to win support from the Democratic Unionist Party and the hardline Brexit-supporting European Research Group in Westminster.
“I’m a Conservative, I’m a Brexiteer. And I’m a Unionist,” Sunak told the Sunday Times. “There’s unfinished business on Brexit and I want to get the job done,” he added.
Separately, in a piece for the Sun on Sunday, Sunak wrote: “There’s still more work to do but we have made promising progress recently and I’m determined to do right by the people of Northern Ireland and deliver for them.”
LONDON — Boris Johnson may have coined the phrase, but Rishi Sunak hopes he’s the man who can finally claim to have “got Brexit done.”
The British prime minister will on Monday host European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in what’s being sold by No. 10 Downing Street as the pair’s “final talks” on resolving the long-running row over post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.
Downing Street has drawn up a carefully choreographed sequence of events following the meeting. Sunak will brief his Cabinet following the late lunchtime face-to-face with the European Commission chief.
He then hopes to hold a joint press conference with von der Leyen to announce any deal before heading to the House of Commons late on Monday to begin his trickiest task yet — selling that deal to Brexiteer MPs on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
It’s likely to mark a defining moment in Sunak’s young premiership, which only began in October when he took over a Conservative Party still riven with divisions following the departures of Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession. If successful, he will hope to draw a line under the rancorous follow-up to Britain’s 2020 departure from the bloc, and herald an era of closer cooperation with Brussels.
But even as Downing Street was drawing up plans for Monday’s grand unveiling, members of Sunak’s own party were voicing skepticism that the prime minister will have done enough to win their backing. And without DUP support, Northern Ireland’s moribund power-sharing assembly could remain collapsed.
Testing times
Since taking office, Sunak has put securing a deal with Brussels on the so-called Northern Ireland protocol near the top of his to-do list.
The post-Brexit arrangement has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the operation of the protocol while addressing the concerns of both the DUP and traders hit by extra bureaucracy.
Under the protocol, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market while avoiding such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
But the DUP sees the protocol as separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. and is boycotting the region’s power-sharing government until changes are made.
In a statement Sunday night, Downing Street said Sunak wanted “to ensure any deal fixes the practical problems on the ground, ensures trade flows freely within the whole of the U.K., safeguards Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and returns sovereignty to the people of Northern Ireland.”
The Belfast to Dublin motorway crosses the border line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Downing Street has kept the detail of any deal a closely-guarded secret. In an interview on Sky News Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab talked up the prospect of “more of an intelligence-based approach” to goods checks, and a move away from individual checks at Northern Irish ports. The U.K. and EU have already talked up more access for Brussels to British goods data.
One of the biggest flashpoints for Brexiteer MPs and the DUP will be the status of the Court of Justice of the European Union in governing disputes under the protocol. They see the continued presence of the EU’s top court in the arrangement as a challenge to British sovereignty.
On Sunday, Mark Francois, chairman of the European Research Group of Conservative Euroskeptics, set a high bar for his support, warning any deal must see Northern Ireland treated on the “same basis” as the rest of Great Britain. He warned that even a reduced role for the CJEU over Northern Ireland was not “good enough.”
Raab told Sky that scaling back some of the regulatory checks and paperwork “would in itself involve a significant, substantial scaling back of the role of the ECJ,” and he talked up the idea of a “proper democratic check coming out of the institutions in Stormont,” the home of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly.
Minefield
One potential source of Brexit trouble on Sunak’s benches is Johnson himself, who has already been warning the prime minister not to drop the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill aimed at allowing U.K. ministers to unilaterally sideline the arrangement.
The Sunday Times reported that Johnson, while being lobbied to support a deal to cement relations with U.S. President Joe Biden, responded with the colorful retort: “F*** the Americans!” The same paper cited a “source close to” Johnson who dismissed it as “a jocular conversation in the [House of Commons] chamber that someone evidently misunderstood.”
As another defining Brexit week begins, Sunak appears willing to plow ahead, even without the support of the most hardline Brexiteers in his party. Raab insisted on Sunday MPs would “have the opportunity to express themselves on the deal,” but did not elaborate on whether there will be a House of Commons vote on the arrangement.
Former Chancellor George Osborne, one of the key figures in the campaign to remain in the European Union, urged Sunak to press on and “call the bluff” of the DUP, Johnson and the ERG — or his premiership would be “severely weakened.”
“Having got to this point in the minefield, he has to proceed,” Osborne told the Andrew Neil Show.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — The U.K. and the EU finally reached a deal after months of talks over contentious post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.
Already, both sides are pitching it as a major reset in frayed relations — but U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak still has to sell it to skeptics in his own party and beyond.
The so-called “Windsor Framework” comes after a final day of talks between Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Windsor.
In key developments Monday:
— Sunak and von der Leyen talked up the deal as a “new chapter” in EU-U.K. ties at a Windsor press conference.
— The U.K. PM urged his MPs to get behind him in a Commons statement, as key Brexiteers gave supportive early comments.
— Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) vowed to study the text closely before deciding whether or not to back it.
— And Brexiteers in the U.K. hit out at No. 10 Downing Street over a meeting between King Charles III and von der Leyen on the same day a deal was struck.
‘New chapter’
Details of the new agreement are now being pored over by lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel, but the plan is aimed at easing customs red-tape, equalizing some tax rules across the United Kingdom, and giving Northern Ireland’s lawmakers more of a say over the future of the arrangement.
“The United Kingdom and European Union may have had our differences in the past, but we are allies, trading partners and friends, something that we’ve seen clearly in the past year as we joined with others to support Ukraine,” Sunak said at the joint press conference. “This is the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship.”
That line was echoed by von der Leyen, who said the plan would allow the two sides “to begin a new chapter,” and offer up “long-lasting solutions that both of us are confident will work for all people and businesses in Northern Ireland.”
Sunak — under pressure to hold a House of Commons vote on the agreement — told MPs Monday evening that the arrangement would end “burdensome customs bureaucracy” and “routine checks” on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, and claimed he had “delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for … We have removed the border in the Irish Sea.”
He now faces the sizable task of convicing Brexiteer lawmakers on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s fiercely anti-protocol DUP, to get on board.
“Our judgment and our principled position in opposing the protocol in Parliament and at Stormont has been vindicated,” said DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson Monday night. “Undoubtedly it is now recognized that the protocol does not work. When others said there would be no renegotiation and no change, our determination has proved what can be achieved.”
Stormont brake
The protocol has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the way it works.
Under the arrangement, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market and avoid such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The DUP has been boycotting the region’s power-sharing government while it pushes for major changes to a set-up it sees as driving a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.
Speaking at the press conference, Sunak and von der Leyen talked up a host of changes to the protocol that they hope will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland.
Under the revised plan, goods moving from Great Britain but destined only for Northern Ireland will travel through a new “green lane” with fewer checks, while a separate, more stringent, “red lane” for goods at risk of moving on to the Republic of Ireland — and thereby entering the EU’s single market — will now operate.
Sunak said food retailers would “no longer need hundreds of certificates for every lorry” entering Northern Ireland, while food made to U.K. standards will be able to be freely sent to and sold in Northern Ireland. He also vowed that the new pact would scrap customs paperwork for people sending parcels to family or friends or shopping online.
UK PM Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hope that the host of changes to the Brexit protocol announced today will be enough to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland | Dan Kitwood/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The two sides have also amended the text of the protocol, Sunak said, to allow U.K. VAT and excise changes to apply in Northern Ireland — while a “landmark” settlement on medicines will mean drugs approved for use by the U.K. medicines regulator will be “automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland.”
And London and Brussels are now jointly pitching a new “Stormont brake,” claiming this will allow the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland — currently on ice amid a DUP boycott over the protocl — to prevent changes to EU goods rules “that would have significant and lasting effects on everyday lives” from applying in the region.
“This gives the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland a powerful new safeguard based on cross-community consent,” Sunak promised.
DUP’s next move
As he departed for London, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he and senior party colleagues would “take time to look at the deal” – a process likely to run at least through the weekend and to involve specially-commissioned analysis by constitutional lawyers. Early word from some Conservative Brexiteers was positive, with David Davis — who quit Theresa May’s government over her own EU deal-making — hailed it as a “a formidable negotiating success.”
Before flying out of Belfast, Donaldson briefed his party’s 25 members of the Northern Ireland Assembly about the expected key points. The DUP lawmakers met at Stormont, the seat of the power-sharing legislature that the DUP has blocked since May.
Donaldson said the DUP’s legal counsel would produce a detailed analysis for consideration by the party’s executive officers.
“It is vital that Northern Ireland’s place within the U.K. and its internal market is restored. We will have lawyers assess the legal text to ensure that this [is] in fact the case,” Donaldson told the Belfast News Letter, the main unionist newspaper in Northern Ireland.
Later, Donaldson told the BBC he was “neither positive nor negative” when assessing whether the DUP should accept the compromise package on offer.
“We need to take time to look at the deal, what’s available, and how does that match our seven tests,” he said, referring to the DUP’s July 2021 list of demands for “replacing” the protocol.
Other DUP officials said the party’s senior leadership would convene at party headquarters in Belfast, possibly on Saturday, to review the party’s legal verdict on the deal – and whether concessions won by the U.K. government were sufficient to end the DUP’s obstruction of power-sharing at Stormont.
Donaldson will seek maximum support at that meeting before committing to any policy pivot on the protocol. Other senior officials, including former deputy leader Lord Dodds, have explicitly rejected the idea of reviving Stormont if the revised protocol agreement retains any oversight role for the CJEU. Both Donaldson and the DUP’s “seven tests” have stopped short of drawing this red line.
Ever since narrowly losing May’s assembly elections to the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin, the DUP has refused not only to form a new cross-community government – the assembly’s central function under terms of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord – but also has blocked the election of a neutral speaker for the assembly, preventing it from sitting.
This developing story is being updated. Annabelle Dickson and Noah Keate contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — Whisper it softly, but the Brexit endgame has arrived.
Eighteen months after Brussels and London reopened talks on the contentious Northern Ireland protocol — and more than three years after Britain actually left the EU — panicked officials on both sides of the English Channel are frantically trying to manage expectations as reports of a technical-level deal between the two sides emerge.
“They’re still in calls with the EU, but it’s literally just lawyers tidying up bits of text,” one senior British government official said Wednesday, in reference to the U.K. negotiating team. “We’re done.”
Multiple reports suggest U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now has a draft technical deal on his desk to consider, despite a wave of both official and unofficial denials from politicians and diplomats on all sides.
“I suspect it is more the technical shape of a deal than a deal per se,” said a second person close to the talks on the U.K. side, “which might be giving them wriggle room to deny it.”
Denials of an outright agreement were still coming thick and fast Wednesday night after the Times reported that London and Brussels had indeed reached a deal on the key customs and governance disputes that have dogged talks over the protocol. Crucially — and most contentiously — its front page story suggested the EU has given ground on the role its top court will play in resolving future disputes.
That followed earlier reporting late last week by Bloomberg News that technical-level solutions on customs, state aid and checks were indeed within touching distance.
Talks on smoothing the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol have been ongoing since the summer of 2021, with negotiators long targeting a deal this month, ahead of an expected visit to Ireland by U.S. President Joe Biden in April.
The protocol arrangement, agreed as part of the Brexit divorce deal, sees Northern Ireland continue to follow the EU’s customs union and single market rules, in an effort to avoid a politically-sensitive hard border with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member state.
Yet Northern Ireland’s unionist politicians have long objected to the protocol, with the Democratic Unionist Party boycotting power-sharing and arguing that checks on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland effectively separate the region from the rest of the U.K. They’re backed by critics in Sunak’s governing Conservative Party who resent the Court of Justice of the European Union’s place in protocol governance.
Selling a deal to those domestic audiences represents an almighty political challenge for a prime minister already battling to keep his fractured party together.
The official line
Officially, both sides are sticking to the script and insisting that talks continue.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters Wednesday: “I’m very sorry, but I cannot give partial elements — because you never know in the very end how the package looks like.”
In Downing Street, Sunak’s official spokesperson tried to steer journalists away from what he called “speculative” reporting.
“No deal has been agreed, there is still lots of work to do on all areas, with significant gaps remaining between the U.K. and EU positions,” the spokesperson said. “Talks are ongoing on potential solutions including on goods.”
But the senior U.K. official quoted before said the message from No. 10 that negotiations are ongoing only applied at a political level.
They added: “It’s now up to politicians to decide ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ Rishi could have further technical talks with Ursula von der Leyen and [EU Brexit point-man] Maroš Šefčovič and stuff like that, but officials are done. It’s plain as day.”
According to the second person close to the talks, Sunak has been receiving regular updates on the evolving technical shape of the deal.
“As far as I know, he hasn’t given it the green light yet,” they said. “But it is all being quite ‘secret squirrel’ in the [U.K.] Cabinet Office. So I don’t think many people will be fully in the loop.”
In Brussels and in London, EU diplomats were busy rubbishing reports of an imminent resolution, while acknowledging that information on the state of play is being kept tight. European ambassadors were briefed on Wednesday morning that a breakthrough is yet to be reached, and that the CJEU issue remains particularly tricky.
Even inside the U.K., claim and counter-claim were flying. Another British official close to the talks said it was “just wrong [that a deal] is close,” with “fundamental” issues outstanding “including making sure there isn’t a border.” They would not, the person added, “expect anything in the short term.”
One EU diplomat summed up the mood: “If somebody tells you they know what’s happening, they’re lying.”
In truth, a final agreement on Brexit has never looked so close.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
It is built on a vast 230-acre site, with a total cost put at more than £100m, and has space for 1,700 heavy goods vehicles. Security staff are on patrol at several checkpoints around its 12-foot-high perimeter fence. Inside are new state-of-the-art buildings and equipment for inspecting imports from Europe.
But more than six months after completion, this heavily guarded supposed showpiece of a newly independent Britain lies all but deserted. It is labelled by people who live nearby as the great white elephant of Brexit, spanking new but largely redundant. The only imports being inspected are a few pets from Ukraine.
Talk to local people about the Sevington inland border facility (IBF) in Kent, and they are beyond despair. No one knows when, or even if, this giant testament to the UK’s increasingly costly and chaotic exit from the EU will ever be used for its intended purpose.
Locally, the word is that the IBF will soon be turned over for development into warehouses or housing. Rachel Brown, who lives a stone’s throw from the perimeter, said what had happened was “horrendous”: “If they are not using it what is the point? It will be a housing estate in a few years. It is a complete disgrace.” Another Sevington resident, Terry, who did not want to give his surname, added: “It is a farce, a white elephant. It is quite obvious no one knew how Brexit was going to turn out or what to do. The result is we are left with this on the doorstep.” IBFs at Ebbsfleet and Warrington have already been closed.
Empty lorry parking spaces at the Sevington inland border facility, built to accommodate 1,700 HGVs. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
On Friday the odd lorry trundled in for HMRC customs checks which are now handled in a small section of the site.
Sevington was built in little over two years mainly to conduct import inspections on goods of plant and animal original from the EU, a responsibility of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
But the regime of rules it was built to administer has never come into force because of U-turns forced on government by the dawning realisation that trade operates better without friction.
The Kent site, just off the M20 near Ashford, is the biggest of seven such depots constructed across the country away from busy ports – in this case Dover.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, when minister for Brexit opportunities, delayed the start of checks on EU imports. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
But when building work was nearing completion in 2021, ministers started having doubts about the effect of burdensome checks, as trade with the EU declined. Last spring Jacob Rees-Mogg, then minister for Brexit opportunities, delayed the start of checks for the fourth time, fearing they would be too bureaucratic and costly for businesses, and cause more tailbacks on Kent’s roads.
An announcement on what regime will now be introduced is scheduled for early this year. A government spokesperson said Sevington would still play a key role in “creating a seamless, digital border”. But it is certain to be a lighter touch one than that previously envisaged, putting Sevington’s suitability for purpose further in doubt.
Defra told the Observer on Friday that it now had “no current operations” at Sevington “except a small presence” which “was temporarily available for holding pets during the Ukraine response”.
Richard Ballantyne, chief executive of the British Ports Association, said the Sevington site was a costly mistake caused by the rush to “get Brexit done” and a failure to foresee what it would entail.
He and other industry experts had been warning about problems of operating a hard border for years before Brexit. “The reason for building these places was that policymakers wanted to leave (the EU) quickly to get something done but the actual arrangements, the nuts and bolts we needed, were not clear. Policymakers have now realised there are some consequences to having a hard border which we don’t like, which are costly inspections and delays, which harm business. I think they have realised we probably don’t need to have these checks because we have very similar standards to the EU. We simply don’t need to do these things. But there is a big cost to the exchequer.”
He added: “I think it would have been better for us if we had decided what our departure would look like. You have got to understand what the costs and consequences are. There has been a lot of wasted money.”
Defra says it will announce a new programme of controls and inspections in the next few weeks. But the tune has changed. There is less talk now of hard borders, more of reducing friction – the whole idea of the EU single market.
Industry experts say the change of mind runs deeper, and suggest ministers are even considering moving back to closer alignment with EU rules for certain traded products, including those of plant and animal origin.
Sevington is just one piece – albeit probably the biggest – in a post-Brexit jigsaw of new inland and port infrastructure, much of which may never be used. In July 2020, the government announced a £705m funding package for border facilities, jobs and technology. About £200m of this was made available for ports to develop their own facilities, which they did, but many now find they cannot use what they’ve built.
Loading bays at Portsmouth’s border control post, built to carry out import checks which are no longer required. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian
Next to the container terminal at Portsmouth International Port, is a new hi-tech £25m border control post, the cost of which was met jointly by Portsmouth city council and the taxpayer. Like Sevington, it was supposed to carry out checks on imports of animal and plant products arriving from the EU.
Ballantyne says places such as Portsmouth now have their own “white elephants”. They had hoped to fund the running and staff costs from charging for inspections which they now cannot do. “They are stuck. Government will not compensate the sector for the operating costs. They will not finance the demolishing of such infrastructure. We are very frustrated by this,” he said.
Meanwhile, the port of Dover received a £45m investment last week from the government’s levelling up fund (originally envisaged to help deprived parts of the UK) to improve the flow of traffic from the UK to the EU and reduce congestion on local roads post-Brexit. The levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, who, like Rees-Mogg, had insisted that Brexit would be all good news for the UK economy, has found that in reality it comes at a very heavy cost to his own budget as well as to British taxpayers.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
