Britain was warned of more friction and less trade with the EU if it goes ahead with unilateral action to reduce political tension over Brexit in Northern Ireland.
The European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill would be Ulster’s unique entrance to the EU market with 450 million consumers at risk.
Speaking in Westminster he told British and European parliaments that the UK was entitled as a free nation to change its own laws as it desires, but he added that more divergence would carry even more costs and would also exacerbate the barriers to trade between the EU and the United Kingdom and that more divergence would mean more friction and less trade.
The NIP Bill was presented in the summer with the purpose of sweeping away key parts of the Brexit agreement, adding a check-free green channel for goods from mainland Britain and stripping control from the EU court.
It would also ensure that VAT changes from Westminster apply to the province, allow state subsidies, and give ministers wide-ranging powers to cancel more of the divorce terms thereafter if needed.
It came as Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen agreed to work together to end the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol when they met for the first time at Cop27 in Egypt.
In Egypt, the new Prime Minister met the European Commission president as both attended the Cop27 climate conference on Monday, with Rishi Sunak highlighting the need to find solutions to the very real problems caused by the post-Brexit arrangements in the region.
Rishi Sunak inherits from his predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson the problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which is vocally opposed by unionists who argue it cuts off the region from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The post-Brexit solution, designed to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, is cited as the Democratic Unionist Party’s primary reason for refusing to return to powersharing.
The instability in Northern Ireland has raised concerns in Dublin, Brussels and Washington, and the row between the United Kingdom and the EU offers few signs of coming to a prompt conclusion, despite indications of a more optimistic tone from the British side in recent weeks.
Ms von der Leyen called it a good first meeting.
Brexit has been a catastrophe, and most people knew that it would be but Britain never learns and never will, and to be fair, I can’t name one good Brexit benefit because there are none.
The only thing that we got from Brexit was migrants coming in, day in and day out, and we don’t need to build a hard border in Ireland again, that will only stir up trouble again and it definitely won’t go down well.
We will now pay for this Brexit catastrophe with a more increased cost of living, overinflated prices and pensions that are now worthless, and if the United Kingdom wasn’t in dire straits before, it definitely is now.
We could blame earlier Prime Ministers for this complete and utter debacle, but then it wouldn’t matter who was in power, none of them can see the wood for the trees because they’re all inept civil servants who have all failed the British people, but for the good or the bad we now have to make the best of things, but they definitely haven’t turned out too well.
We have left the EU, people voted to leave, some people voted to remain, but people still can’t quit complaining that we’re now not allowed access to the tariff-free easy trade we had before we left. It’s time to realise that Brexit has done nothing but make this country economically poorer, but I guess it’s hard to come to terms with when all those Brexit promises haven’t materialised.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 