EU fears UK is rowing back on Irish border and level playing field: sources
BRUSSELS - The European Union is increasingly worried about British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s stance on the Irish border and future competition rules, sources said on Thursday.
He says he is making progress in talks to rework the terms that his predecessor Teresa May agreed with the EU but failed to pass at home - but European diplomats say London has yet to make any meaningful proposals. “The Brits have an unrealistic belief that everything will be miraculously solved at the summit,” one EU diplomat said on Thursday.
Johnson wants the EU to drop the ‘backstop’, a policy that would tie the UK to the bloc’s trading rules after Brexit until a better way is found to preserve the open border between EU member Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland.Both Dublin and the EU say that to restore border infrastructure would endanger a peace accord that largely ended decades of sectarian violence in the province, in part by removing checkpoints and making the border essentially invisible.
According to the sources, they said London was still proposing that checks would be carried out elsewhere on the island after Brexit, and that this would infringe the parts of the peace accord that provide for north and south to be a single economic zone with frictionless trade. The EU is worried, however, that London no longer wants to legally commit to a ‘level playing field’ - shorthand for agreed baseline rules on environmental standards, labor regulations and state aid - to ensure Britain would not be able to offer products in the EU at dumping prices.
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