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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to circumvent international Brexit law will be blocked by the House of Lords next month, sparking an incendiary initial test of relations with Joe Biden if he wins the US election in next week.
Biden warned that Johnson’s UK internal market bill would undermine the Northern Ireland peace process and that he would never sign a trade deal with the UK unless key clauses of the bill are removed.
Members of the upper house of parliament are expected to force Biden by voting overwhelmingly to remove six clauses from the bill, which ministers have admitted will violate Britain’s withdrawal treaty, signed last year with the EU.
The November 9 vote in the House of Lords will come less than a week after the November 3 US presidential election and amid what will likely be the final stages of the EU negotiations with the UK on a new trade agreement.
Johnson will then face the dilemma of committing his government to reinstate the controversial clauses in the House of Commons, risking a dispute with Biden, if he wins the election, and with Brussels. The European Commission has already started legal proceedings against the UK for violating the “good faith” provisions of the treaty.
There is little doubt that Johnson will be defeated in the upper house, where his Conservative peers led by former Conservative leader Michael Howard joined forces with members of the opposition and various banks earlier this month to condemn the legislation.
The peers voted 395 votes to 169 on 20 October in favor of a motion lamenting that the domestic market bill would “undermine the rule of law and damage the reputation of the UK.”
Johnson introduced the clauses into the domestic market bill because he claimed the EU was planning to interpret the Brexit withdrawal treaty – and the linked Northern Ireland protocol – in an “extreme” way, creating a hard border between the region. and the rest of the country. UNITED KINGDOM.
The proposed legislation would seek to limit the EU’s powers to determine state aid for Northern Ireland businesses and customs arrangements in the region.
But Biden said last month that the bill would undermine the agreement between the EU and the UK to keep an open border on the island of Ireland. “We cannot allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a victim of Brexit,” he tweeted.
The House of Lords vote was expected to take place in late November, but his peers wanted to remove all six clauses from the bill as soon as possible, at the committee stage of the bill.
Labor leader in the Lords, Angela Smith, said: “I urge Downing Street to seek to solve the problem. The smart approach would be for them to remove the offending clauses, so that colleagues can focus on analyzing and improving the rest of the bill. “
The Lords vote could take place in the final stages of negotiations on a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK. The talks will end in London on Wednesday before moving to Brussels on Thursday.
Both sides are now working towards a mid-November deadline for a deal, a deadline that would still give the European Parliament enough time to ratify the deal.
The EU parliament has scheduled its vote during its last session of the year, in the week of December 14, just two weeks before the end of Britain’s post-Brexit transition.
EU officials said much of this week’s talks in London had been tackled with the technical challenge of crafting a common text in areas where there is already considerable agreement, including many of the conditions for trade in goods and services. , with a mix of the EU and UK drafts being used as base texts which are then being modified.
A spokesman for the European Commission said on Tuesday that “both sides are intensely engaging to reach an agreement,” but a person briefed on the talks said that no progress had yet been made in unlocking the key fishing spots, conditions of “equal conditions”. for trade and governance agreements for the agreement. –The Financial Times Limited
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