The EU is to unveil new legal proposals for altering the Northern Ireland protocol after Britain’s Brexit minister claimed not renegotiating the deal would be a “historic misjudgement”.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission’s vice president, has promised “very far-reaching” changes to address the movement of goods across the Irish Sea. Reports suggest his plan will offer to lift half of customs checks on goods and more than half of checks on meat and plant products.
It comes the day after Lord Frost accused Brussels of being “disrespectful” to the UK by enforcing the deal he and Boris Johnson negotiated, leading the pro-EU Liberal Democrats to describe his approach as “a badly written farce”.
Lord Frost said in a speech in Lisbon yesterday: “For the EU now to say that the protocol – drawn up in extreme haste in a time of great uncertainty – can never be improved upon, when it is so self-evidently causing such significant problems, would be a historic misjudgement.”
