Latest updates: foreign secretary to make statement to MPs as Dublin says ‘breaking international law not the answer’
And here are some of the main lines from Brandon Lewis’s interviews on the Northern Ireland protocol.
What sometimes gets missed in this is that what the EU is proposing now is that some of the checks we’ve had grace periods for – we are at a standstill at the moment where we are not fully applying some of the checks the EU wants – they actually want to bring those in, so they want to make matters materially worse for the people of Northern Ireland, and that’s just not viable.
The solution is, and what we’ve been outlining to the EU, that products that are moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland should effectively go through what has colloquially been called a ‘green lane’.
So, those products that are being consumed in the UK, used in the UK, from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, should not be going through the same checks as products that are moving into the EU, into the single market – that’s pretty much what we have been outlining.
