Former Brexit director David Davis has warned that resolving the Northern Ireland border dispute might take ten years.
The Government presented measures this week to overrule crucial elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol, igniting new tensions between the UK and the EU.
The unilateral decision by London spurred Brussels to resurrect legal action, threatening a new trade war between the UK and the EU.
Maros Sefcovic, vice-president of the European Commission, slammed Britain’s’really destructive’ and ‘politically motivated’ decision to change post-Brexit border arrangements on its own.
The senior Brussels official now risks inflaming tensions even further by implying that it is the EU’s obligation to defend people in Northern Ireland’s ‘public health.’
Mr Davis, a major Leave campaigner who went on to become Brexit Secretary under former Prime Minister Theresa May, agreed that neither side of the Brexit referendum discussion had adequately recognised the consequences of the UK leaving the EU on the island of Ireland.
He also predicted that a permanent solution to the border problem may take a decade.
Many of the benefits of Brexit are yet to be realized, according to the ex-Cabinet minister in an interview with Politico’s Westminster Insider podcast.
Mr Davis, who said the Covid epidemic was mostly to blame, said: ‘It’s largely recoverable.’
‘I mean, it’ll take a long time to go to Ireland.’
‘I believe it will take a decade to get it correctly… ‘I might be incorrect about a decade, but it’ll take years.’
Mr Davis alleged that ‘Remainers’ at Number 10’shut him out’ of decision-making under Mrs May.
He also conceded that it was a “legitimate critique” to argue that during the 2016 referendum campaign, neither side of the Brexit argument predicted “all the outcomes” for Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, Mr Sefcovic argued in an interview with Sky News that Boris Johnson’s introduction of new legislation to override the Protocol was ‘politically motivated,’ but that it was not the EU’s responsibility to ‘comment on internal politics in the UK.’
He called a new Bill issued this week as’really detrimental’ to trust between the UK and the EU, which the Government hopes to push into law if discussions with Brussels on the Protocol continue to stall.
In reaction to the UK’s actions, Mr Sefcovic warned that the EU will ‘keep all alternatives on the table,’ including a trade war.
He also risks exacerbating the schism between London and Brussels by stating that inspections in the Irish Sea are needed to safeguard Northern Ireland against dangerous products entering from the United Kingdom.
Mr Sefcovic claimed he was ‘totally ruling out the hard border’ when asked if the EU would ever erect a commercial barrier between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
However, he warned that the UK’s failure to continue to not inspect goods traveling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which is functionally part of the EU’s single market, would constitute further ‘illegality’ on London’s part.
‘We have to make sure that public health is not jeopardized, not just for people in the European Union, but also for individuals in Northern Ireland,’ he said on the Beth Rigby Interviews show.