Entente Discordiale: UK fires back in NI and French fishing Brexit rows
The UK’s relations with its nearest neighbours have fallen to a new low over the weekend, with ongoing rows over fishing rights and Northern Ireland threatening to throw post-Brexit planning into chaos.
First, Boris Johnson said it was “up to France” to solve a battle over fishing rights, with the UK Government still incensed after a leaked letter revealed French politicians had asked the EU to “punish” the UK for leaving the bloc.
After a meeting between Johnson and his Paris counterpart Emmanuel Macron on the outskirts of the G20 meeting in Rome, French sources suggested a deal was in the works to cool tensions over the number of licences being offered to French fisherman.
But Downing Street hit back, saying no such measures had been agreed and that Johnson had “reiterated his deep concern over the rhetoric emanating from the French government in recent days.
“We are not seeking to escalate this,” an official spokesperson said, adding that “we would welcome it if they de-escale and withdraw the threats they have made. It will be for the French to decide.”
Relations are unlikely to be warmed today after the overnight publication of a foreword to a Policy Exchange report by Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost, who has written that the EU has “destroyed cross-community consent” in Northern Ireland with heavy-handed enforcement of customs measures at the Irish border.
Frost said the protocol agreed between the UK and the EU came with the “risk… that the EU’s approach to the Protocol would not be consistent with the explicit commitment to protect the (Good Friday) Agreement.”
Frost said the “insistence of the EU on treating these arrangements as like any other part of its customs and single market rules” has “begun to damage the thing it was designed to protect – the Good Friday Agreement.”
European officials remain insistent that the Northern Irish protocol will not be reopened for further negotiations – particularly with regard to the oversight role of the European Court of Justice.
Frost had already hit out at the leaked French letter over the weekend, saying it was “part of a pattern that has persisted for much of this year.”
The UK has warned that threats to implement so-called ‘November 2’ measures are in breach of the post-Brexit Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) that the country tabled with the European Union.
Those measures include banning British fishing boats from French waters in retaliation for the UK’s perceived intransigence on the issue to this point.
The twin rows threaten to overshadow the UN Cop-26 summit in Glasgow, which the UK had been hoping to use as a flagship for a green, global Britain.
There are also concerns that the outcome of the fishing row could be the beginning of a UK-EU trade war, despite fragile economic recoveries on both sides of the Channel and the wider EU area.