LONDON: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has accused the European Union of threatening to tear the UK apart by imposing a food “blockade” between Britain and Northern Ireland, throwing new fuel on the fire of simmering Brexit talks.

Writing in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Johnson said the EU’s stance justified his government’s introduction of new legislation to rewrite its Brexit withdrawal treaty — a bill that is causing deep alarm among his own MPs.

Talks between London and Brussels on a future trading relationship are deadlocked as both sides struggle to prise apart nearly 50 years of economic integration, after British voters opted for a divorce.

“My assessment is that an unregulated situation (no deal) would have very significant consequences for the British economy,” German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz warned on Saturday after a meeting of EU finance ministers in Berlin.

“Europe would be able to deal with it and these would not be particularly difficult consequences after the preparations we have already made,” he added.

German minister says failure to clinch a deal will have serious consequences for Britain

But absent a deal by the end of this year, when the full force of Brexit kicks in, Johnson said the EU was bent on an “extreme interpretation” of rules for Northern Ireland under the divorce treaty both sides signed in January.

“We are being told that the EU will not only impose tariffs on goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, but that they might actually stop the transport of food products from GB to NI,” he wrote.

“I have to say that we never seriously believed that the EU would be willing to use a treaty, negotiated in good faith, to blockade one part of the UK, to cut it off, or that they would actually threaten to destroy the economic and territorial integrity of the UK.”

Johnson said the EU’s stance would “seriously endanger peace and stability in Northern Ireland”, and stressed he remained committed to finding agreement with the EU by the end of the year, but the new UK Internal Market Bill was a “legal safety net”.

The EU, however, has threatened Britain with legal action unless it withdraws its unilateral changes by the end of September, and leaders in the European Parliament on Friday threatened to veto any trade pact if London violates its promises.

Paolo Gentiloni, the EU’s economics affairs commissioner, said it was up to Britain to “re-establish trust” with the bloc.

“And in any case... we are prepared to deal with extraordinary negative outcome of this discussion,” the former Italian prime minister added in Berlin.

The government’s claim that the treaty contains unforeseen problems was undercut by a Financial Times report on Saturday that British civil servants explicitly highlighted the potential issues in January, at least a week before Johnson signed it.

Under the EU withdrawal treaty, Northern Ireland will enjoy a special status to ensure no return of a border with EU member Ireland, in line with a 1998 peace pact that ended three decades of bloodshed.

The food dispute centres on the EU’s refusal so far to grant Britain “third country” status, which acknowledges that nations meet basic requirements to export their foodstuffs to Europe.

The EU is worried that post-Brexit Britain could undermine its own food standards, as well as rules on state aid for companies, and infiltrate its single market via Northern Ireland.

Johnson’s article appeared after he held a chaotic videoconference on Friday evening with mutinous Conservative MPs who are aghast at the prospect of the government tearing up an international treaty.

Senior Conservative backbencher Robert Neill was unimpressed by Johnson’s calls to push the bill through and prevent a renewal of the Brexit infighting that paralysed parliament last year.

“I believe it is potentially a harmful act for this country, it would damage our reputation and I think it will make it harder to strike trade deals going forward,” Neill told Channel 4 News.

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2020