Talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol are “kind of stuck”, an EU source has told Sky News as Boris Johnson heads to Belfast to try to make headway on the issue.
The Brussels source said it was “not true or fair to say that we are being intransigent” and that the UK was asking for the kind of flexibility that has been offered to Ukraine even though “the UK is not at war”.
Ireland’s foreign minister foreign minister Simon Coveney warned that if Britain goes it alone in pulling out of the Protocol that could endanger its wider Brexit trade deal with the EU – an agreement which averted the threat of tariffs.
Boris Johnson hopes for talks ‘without drama’ in Northern Ireland – follow latest
Downing Street insiders told Sky News political editor Beth Rigby that acting unilaterally on the protocol, which governs Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangement, remains “very much a last resort” and that the PM wants to “sort this out calmly and rationally, without drama”.
…
