Some potentially conciliatory remarks by Irish foreign minister @simoncoveney on the Internal Mkt Bill standoff, following today's General Affairs Council in Brussels:
1/ Coveney said the interim between when the Bill leaves the Commons and is concluded by the Lords could allow both sides, through the Joint Committee, to "address the issues" the Bill professes to address
2/ "There’s likely to be a break of a number of weeks between the Commons consideration and the Lords consideration of this legislation.
3/ "That’s a window that all of us should look to as an opportunity to make progress. Because if we can deal with the issues that the legislation proposes to deal with, in the absence of agreement, then it makes that legislation irrelevant.”
4/ Coveney says two of the three issues the UK has issues with on the NI Protocol - ie, the state aid reach back and tariffs on goods going GB-NI - would be made "less contentious, if contentious at all" if an FTA was reached
5/ Diplomats say the third issue - exit summary declarations on goods going NI-GB - were already being explored by the Joint Committee. Progress was being made at seeing how such controls could be simplified. "This is the sort of thing the EU is very good at," says one diplomat.
6/ The JC meets again in Brussels on Mon (the next scheduled mtg had been this Fri but it would have clashed with the European Council...). Several officials have said the JC was already working hard on simplifying the protocol requirements, which is why the bill was so shocking
7/ Coveney was clear that the EU would not regard the Internal Market Bill as "negotiating currency" that the UK could use in the Joint Committee.
8/ One diplomat adds that the EU is not going to "negotiate" at JC level "under duress", as in "if we do x then maybe they'll drop the legislation. They won't get into that frame of mind."
9/ On the state aid issue, if an FTA is successfully concluded then a joint EU-UK mechanism on state aid would make the reach back effect of the NI Protocol largely academic and unthreatening, is the logic...
10/ Coveney also says a growing number of MS believe the Internal Market Bill is really a ruse to allow the talks to collapse and for the UK to blame the EU...
11/ “What has been concerning over the past couple of days for me speaking to other EU foreign ministers, is that there’s a growing sense that the UK perhaps doesn’t want a deal. And that this is more about managing the blame game as the negotiations fail.”
12/ However, Coveney said he reassured his colleagues that he believed the UK did want a deal.
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