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The UK will present its long-awaited finance bill next week, but the controversial clauses anticipated to void the Brexit withdrawal deal are expected to be scrapped if a trade deal is reached beforehand.
The EU has warned that trade talks will be suspended immediately if the government goes ahead with a second batch of legislation granting unilateral powers to breach part of the withdrawal agreement signed in January.
“If you violate the withdrawal agreement, there is no deal,” said a senior source in Brussels.
However, government sources have said that the content of the bill depends on the progress of the trade talks, now in a decisive phase.
If a deal is reached this week, the clauses are “quite unlikely if we are in a world of trade deals,” they said.
The bill has been on the cards since September and was expected to include several clauses reflecting the controversial measures in the domestic market bill, denounced by three former prime ministers and rejected last month by the House of Lords. who was horrified by the government’s admission. he was willing to violate international law.
If the government goes ahead, the finance bill with its contentious clauses intact would be seen by the EU as an incendiary act if trade and security negotiations were ongoing, but in Brussels there are no expectations of such an outcome.
Sources in the UK said the next three to five days were critical, hoping that even if a deal doesn’t emerge before Friday, it will do so over the weekend.
The proposed finance bill would have given a minister unilateral power to decide which goods exported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland would be considered “at risk” of entering the Republic of Ireland.
Such “at risk” goods would incur tariffs, although the tax would be refundable if it could be shown that the item remained in Northern Ireland.
The issue is being debated by the joint EU-UK committee implementing the withdrawal agreement. But a trade deal offering “zero tariffs and quotas” on goods traded between the UK and the EU would completely solve the problem, leaving the government without any requirement for the relevant clauses in the finance bill.
A separate line of talks led by the joint UK-EU committee chaired by Michael Gove and Maroš Šefčovič is said to be making good progress on the issue and on the free movement of food between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. .
The UK government had argued that both the Brexit clauses in the finance bill and the internal market bill were a necessary safety net to ensure unrestricted trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain in the event of trade talks collapse.
In an interview with the Irish Times, the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said: “Now we are really at the end if a deal is to be reached this week.”
