Discussions between the United Kingdom and the European Union over changes to the terms of the Brexit deal on trade with Northern Ireland have reached a stalemate, British Europe Minister James Cleverley told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.
The two sides, according to Reuters, have been trying for months to overcome the impasse over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which sets out the trade rules that govern the British province and which Britain agreed to before leaving the EU, but now the London says they are inapplicable.
Britain’s withdrawal from the EU effectively allows Northern Ireland to remain in the EU single market and customs union, due to its open borders with the bloc, which is a member of the bloc, but puts some barriers to trade between the North and North. Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.
“The truth is that they have reached a dead end and I do not think it is due to a lack of goodwill, I think it is more due to what we consider in the UK to be an extremely limited (EU) negotiating mandate,” he said.
The British government claims that the agreement in its current form is causing friction in trade between Britain and Northern Ireland and is therefore threatening the 1998 peace agreement, which largely ended three decades of religious violence in the British countryside.
Britain, for its part, has said in the past that it has reasons to enforce the clause in the agreement and allow it to abandon certain terms of the Brexit treaty – but a move that could seriously damage the already fragile diplomatic and economic relationship. with the EU.
“The situation as it is now is not working,” Cleverley said, adding that it was not doing what it’s supposed to protect North-South and East-West trade alike, and that this was causing tensions in the Northern Ireland community.
Cleverley said he still hoped for an agreement with the EU, but declined to comment on reports that the government was preparing a law to unilaterally cancel parts of the Brexit agreement, although he acknowledged that pressure to find British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for ways to ease tensions.
Source: Capital
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