The EU is taking a “very purist view” that “makes no sense” on goods moving from Britain to Northern Ireland, the U.K.’s Brexit minister David Frost said.
In an opinion piece published in the Mail on Sunday, Frost added that London was considering “all our options” regarding the Northern Ireland protocol, which he said was imposing unnecessary “paperwork and checks” on U.K. goods that go into Northern Ireland.
The European Union “seems to want to treat goods moving to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK in the same way as the arrival of a vast Chinese container ship at Rotterdam. We did not anticipate this when we agreed the Protocol and it makes no sense,” Frost wrote.
The protocol, a cornerstone of the EU-U.K. Brexit agreement struck in December, was designed to avoid a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland by imposing EU import controls on goods that enter the latter part from Britain.
But “if the Protocol operates so as to damage the political, social, or economic fabric of life in Northern Ireland, then that situation cannot be sustained for long,” Frost, who previously led Brexit negotiations for the U.K. government, wrote.
“We are responsible for protecting the peace and prosperity of everyone in Northern Ireland and we will continue to consider all our options for doing so,” he added and called on the EU to “help find a new approach to Northern Ireland.”
