LONDON, 27 Feb: The U.K. and the European Union were poised Monday to end years of wrangling and seal a deal to resolve their thorny post-Brexit trade dispute over Northern Ireland.
\nStriking an agreement at a meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would be a big victory for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak \u2014 but not the end of his troubles. Selling the deal to his own Conservative Party and its Northern Ireland allies may be a tougher struggle.
\nSign of a potential U.K.-EU breakthrough came Sunday, when the two sides announced that von der Leyen would travel to England for a meeting with Sunak in Windsor, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of London. A joint news conference is penciled in, followed by a statement by Sunak to the House of Commons.
\nA meeting between von der Leyen and King Charles III at Windsor Castle is also planned. The meeting is likely to touch on a variety of issues including climate change and the war in Ukraine.
\nBuckingham Palace said the meeting was taking place on the government\u2019s advice, leading critics to accuse Sunak of dragging the monarch, who is supposed to remain neutral, into a political row.
\n\u201cI cannot quite believe that No. 10 would ask HM the King to become involved in the finalising of a deal as controversial as this one. It\u2019s crass and will go down very badly in NI,\u201d former Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster said on Twitter.
\nSunak\u2019s spokesman, Max Blain, said the government \u201cwould never\u201d embroil the king in politics.
\n\u201cHis Majesty has met with a number of foreign leaders recently,\u201d he said, including Polish President Andrzej Duda and Ukraine\u2019s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. \u201cThis is no different.\u201d
\nIf all goes to plan, the deal could end a dispute that has soured U.K.-EU relations, sparked the collapse of the Belfast-based regional government and shaken Northern Ireland\u2019s decades-old peace process.
\nNorthern Ireland is the only part of the U.K. that shares a border with an EU member, the Republic of Ireland. When the U.K. left the bloc in 2020, the two sides agreed to keep the Irish border free of customs posts and other checks because an open border is a key pillar of Northern Ireland\u2019s peace process.
\nInstead there are checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. That angered British unionist politicians in Belfast, who say the new trade border in the Irish Sea undermines Northern Ireland\u2019s place in the United Kingdom.
\nThe Democratic Unionist Party collapsed Northern Ireland\u2019s Protestant-Catholic power-sharing government a year ago in protest and has refused to return until the rules are scrapped or substantially rewritten.
\nThe DUP has stayed largely silent in recent days, saying it needs to see the details of a deal before deciding whether it meets the party\u2019s self-imposed tests.
\nHints of compromise towards the EU also have sparked opposition from hard-line euroskeptics who form a powerful bloc in Sunak\u2019s governing Conservative Party. Critics include former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who as leader at the time of Brexit signed off on the trade rules that he now derides. Johnson was ousted by the Conservatives last year over ethics scandals, but is widely believed to hope for a comeback.
\nJacob Rees-Mogg, a prominent pro-Brexit Tory lawmaker, said acceptance of any deal \u201cwill all depend\u201d on the DUP. \u201cIf the DUP are against it, I think there will be quite a significant number of Conservatives who are unhappy,\u201d Rees-Moog said.
\nIn a boost for Sunak\u2019s chances of winning Conservative support, lawmaker Steve Baker \u2014 a self-styled \u201cBrexit hardman\u201d who helped topple Prime Minister Theresa May by opposing her Brexit deal in 2019 \u2014 said Sunak was \u201con the cusp of securing a really fantastic result.\u201d AP<\/p>\n
Sunak has said Parliament will get to debate any deal he strikes, but he hasn\u2019t promised lawmakers a binding vote on it, and no vote in Parliament is expected this week. AP<\/p>\n
Relations between the U.K. and the EU, severely tested during the long Brexit divorce, chilled still further amid disputes over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The U.K. government introduced a bill that would let it unilaterally rip up parts of the Brexit agreement, a move the EU called illegal. The bloc accused the U.K. of failing to honor the legally binding treaty it had signed.
\nThe mood between London and Brussels improved after Sunak, a pragmatic Brexit supporter, took office in October, replacing more belligerent predecessors \u2014 Johnson and Liz Truss.
\nA deal is likely to remove customs checks on the vast majority of goods moving between the U.K. and Northern Ireland and to give Northern Ireland lawmakers some say over EU rules that apply there as part of the Protocol.
\nThe thorniest issue is the role of the European Court of Justice in resolving any disputes that arise over the rules.
\nThe U.K. and the EU agreed in their Brexit divorce deal to give the European court that authority. But the DUP and Conservative Brexiteers insist the court must have no jurisdiction in U.K. matters. AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON, 27 Feb: The U.K. and the European Union were poised Monday to end years of wrangling and seal a deal to resolve their thorny post-Brexit trade dispute over Northern Ireland. Striking an agreement at a meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would be a big victory for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-211860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}