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Legislation that would allow the UK government to override parts of the Brexit deal it struck with the European Union is “within the law,” Conservative minister Brandon Lewis said.
The government will go ahead with the legislation on Monday, Lewis said in an interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky News. The bill was meant to be presented last week, but last-minute changes by senior ministers, concerns that it breaches international law and consultations with pro-Brexit MPs caused a delay.
“We as a government will be outlining our legal position and be very clear about why this is within the law,” Lewis, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said on Sky on Sunday. “People will see what we are promising resolves the key issues of the protocol that don’t work.”
Boris Johnson’s government has long been pushing to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol, an agreement that keeps the area in the EU’s single market while creating a customs border with the rest of the UK. The government hopes the bill will pass through the UK’s lower House of Commons before Parliament breaks at the end of July.
Johnson is fighting for his political survival after narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote within his party. He is still reeling from the partygate scandal and becoming the first prime minister found to have broken the law while in office.
READ MORE: UK Tweaks Northern Ireland Bill as EU Readies Legal Action
Any efforts to make unilateral changes to the protocol will provoke the ire of the EU, which would likely react by unfreezing infringement proceedings and ultimately could impose trade or financial penalties on the UK. The plan to change the protocol has been met with fury from EU member states as well as senior politicians in the US, who have said that peace and stability in Northern Ireland should not be jeopardized.
Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said that his British counterpart, Liz Truss, has made no effort to seek any compromises in the dispute, telling Ireland’s Sunday Independent newspaper that she appeared to be jockeying for Johnson’s job.
Coveney told the paper that the protocol battle shouldn’t be used “within the Conservative Party to generate support for potential leadership” because Ireland “is the collateral damage to that political gamesmanship.”
(Updates with Coveney remarks in final paragraphs)
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