Johnson’s guru for ‘Brexit’ acknowledges that when the document was signed in January 2020 they were already planning to ‘throw away’ the parts they did not share
Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, when he signed the Withdrawal Agreement from the European Union in January 2020, wrote on his Twitter account that they already intended to “throw away” the parts of the Protocol on Ireland that they didn’t like. His claim caused a stir at a time of tension between the EU and the UK.
According to Johnson’s guru’s explanation, his team took over the Conservative Party, and the Government, ten points behind the Labor leaders led by Jeremy Corbyn, “in the worst constitutional crisis in a century” and ” with a good part of the ‘Deep State’ supporting a ‘Brexit’ only in name and a second referendum ”.
“So we meandered towards the best option we had, with the intention that ‘the shopping cart’ (his description of Johnson) would throw away what we did not like after taking down Corbyn,” he writes. He believes that now Minister David Frost has to undertake a unilateral change of the Protocol, as Johnson already tried in 2020, when the Trade and Cooperation Treaty was being negotiated.
For the former Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, who agreed with Johnson in 2019 to solve the mess on the Irish border reflected in the Protocol, “these comments are very alarming because they would indicate that this is a government administration that acts in bad faith.” The conservative weekly ‘The Spectator’ wonders if “they will derail the government’s plan to achieve a new protocol.”
Cummings cultivates a reputation as a man of great intelligence, adorned by truculent manner. Actually, Article 13.8 of the Protocol contemplates future agreements between the two parties to change aspects of what was originally agreed. The reason for tension between London and Brussels is not about the legitimacy of changes, but about what they want to change and the fear of unilateralism,
Other frontiers
The European Commission’s reform proposals may converge with those designed by London to drastically reduce bureaucratic requirements on the movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They would have led two hundred British companies to renounce their sales in the Irish province this year, due to the complexity and cost of the procedures.
Nigel Dodds, protagonist of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) during the ‘Brexit’ negotiations, managed to get Frost to confirm in the House of Lords that “issues of democracy and sovereignty are at the heart of the problems” about the Protocol. He referred to the production by Brussels of laws affecting the province and the exclusive jurisdiction of the EU Court.
Cummings believes that Frost is obliged to undertake a unilateral change
Another lord, lawyer David Anderson, asked the minister how it is possible that he claimed in Lisbon on Tuesday that Community laws are applied “without our consent”, when the Protocol states that those rules will affect Northern Ireland with respect to its membership in the market. common and Frost himself consented by signing the Protocol.
The text also contemplates the approval by a mixed committee of representatives of the two parties of the new community norms that apply in the region and the quadrennial approval by the Belfast Assembly of the validity of the Protocol, through the necessary majority mechanism between deputies. of the two communities, unionists and nationalists.
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