U.K. Brexit Minister Attacks EU Handling of Northern Ireland

(Bloomberg) -- The U.K.’s Brexit minister launched a scathing attack on the European Union’s handling of Northern Ireland, as tensions between Britain and France hung over the G-20 summit in Rome and this week’s COP26 meeting in Scotland.

In the foreword to a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank, David Frost wrote that the EU had behaved “without regard to the huge political, economic, and identity sensitivities involved” in the region by enforcing the Northern Ireland protocol overly strictly. This, he said, had “begun to damage” the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely brought peace to the province.

Unlike the rest of the U.K., Northern Ireland has remained inside the bloc’s single market for goods, meaning that products arriving from the rest of Britain are subject to customs formalities. The EU has offered to reduce customs checks on goods arriving in Northern Ireland by half, and inspections on many food products by 80%.

In a column published in Monday’s Telegraph newspaper, European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic urged the U.K. government to find an amicable solution.

“I am increasingly concerned that the U.K. government will refuse to engage with this and embark on a path of confrontation,” he wrote.

A resolution looks distant as a disagreement on French access to British fishing waters muddies cross-Channel relations. At a meeting between the U.K’s Boris Johnson and France’s Emmanuel Macron on Sunday, aimed at defusing tensions, the two couldn’t even agree on what they had said.

Frost also revealed that he considered resigning in December 2017 after reading the terms of the EU-U.K. joint report on the progress of Brexit negotiations, which he said showed Britain had failed to make “the necessary mental shift from being a member of the EU to negotiating exit from the EU.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.