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Prime Minister Johnson promises that the UK will withdraw from the EU by the end of 2020, with or without a free trade agreement. With only a few months to go in the transition period, it seems difficult to reach a consensus on both sides.
Remember “Problems”
Rachel Powell grew up in the Army of the South, where British troops, often attacked by Irish Republican fighters, patrolled along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland during Trouble, a conflict that rocked Northern Ireland in 1968. -1998.
“The British government has no idea what it means to live on the border and is using it again for political football,” Powell told The Washington Post.
Reuters / Photo by Scanpix / Boris Johnson
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Ireland, and today the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is invisible.
According to Powell, local communities are intimidated by uncertainty and dangerous policies towards Brexit.
Last week, Johnson used belligerent rhetoric to say that the EU is working to “divide our country” and stop food supply chains by creating new barriers between Britain and Northern Ireland.
“If we do not agree to the EU conditions, the EU will use an extreme interpretation of the Northern Ireland Protocol to introduce a full trade border in the Irish Sea,” Johnson wrote in the Telegraph.
Irish Foreign Secretary Simon Coveney called John’s claims that Europe was seeking a blockade of Northern Ireland “completely fictitious”.
Europeans are angry that Johnson has introduced a bill that would violate various parts of the Brexit deal, writes The Washington Post.
Last year’s agreement is designed to solve trade and customs problems by allowing Northern Ireland to exit the EU with the rest of the United Kingdom, while maintaining simple commercial and psychological ties with the Republic of Ireland, which will remain part of the Community. .
In the absence of a free trade agreement, some controls between North and South are likely to be needed to collect customs duties.
For his part, EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said the Northern Ireland protocol signed last year does not threaten the integrity of the UK.
North Belfast activist Martin O’Brien, who helped push human rights issues in the Good Friday deal, says: Brexit, especially the form of this government’s Brexit, the hard Brexit, was launched without regard to the consequences for the North. Ireland “.
AFP / Scanpix photo / Protester against Brexit
According to O’Brien, the deal signed between the UK and the EU last year is a “carefully crafted mechanism to minimize the worst effects of Brexit.”
“Now the government has decided not to follow through on the compromise and again it is very destabilizing,” he told The Washington Post.
“Increasing anxiety”
Katy Hayward, a professor at the University of Belfast in Belfast, said “the anxiety is only growing.”
“We are faced with the possibility that the UK is arrogantly violating international law by using Northern Ireland’s position to justify it. This sets a whole new precedent. And it responds very badly to peace, “Hayward said.
More than 3,5 thousand people died during the so-called “troubled” conflict. people, more than half of them civilians.
Johnson’s minister in Northern Ireland acknowledged that the new bill would “violate international law”, but only in a “specific and limited way.”
If the UK and Europe do not sign a trade agreement before the end of the year, trade between the UK and the EU will be subject to the rules of the World Trade Organization and customs duties will apply. 40-year supply chains could be disrupted, writes The Washington Post
Former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major have condemned Johnson’s attempts to repeal parts of the Brexit deal, calling them “shameful”. They asked Labor and Conservatives to vote against the bill.
“This is not just about Ireland, the peace process and the trade agreement negotiations, no matter how important that is.” “This calls into question the unity of our nation,” they wrote in The Sunday Times.
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