UK must accept border on Irish Sea is inevitable, says ex-WTO chief
Boris Johnson’s row with the EU over Northern Ireland’s Brexit arrangements is “absolutely solvable” but only if the UK accepts that a border is inevitable, the former head of the World Trade Organization has said.
But Pascal Lamy said the prime minister could only achieve a breakthrough if he stopped mixing “oil and vinegar” and throwing emotional Brexit politics on to what he said was essentially a technical problem.
Lamy said he did not understand the UK’s strategy, which risked a trade war with the EU, but added that it was unlikely to come to this as the “cost-benefit ratio” was “ridiculous”.
If matters did deteriorate and the EU retaliated with sanctions, the bloc would win as those with greatest capacity for trade generally did, Lamy said.
His comments, in an interview with the Guardian, came after the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, threatened new laws to allow the UK to change some of the Northern Ireland protocol. The UK government has come under pressure from the Democratic Unionist party and the Traditional Unionist Voice, both of whom campaigned on an anti-protocol ticket in the recent Northern Ireland assembly elections.
Lamy, who has followed Brexit closely over the past seven years, and who is now president of the Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit organisation, after leaving the WTO in 2013, said demands to remove the border in the Irish Sea completely would never deliver a breakthrough.
“I don’t understand exactly what they [the UK] are after,” he said. “If it is no border it won’t work. You cannot leave the EU and not have a border. That’s just having your cake and eating it.
“So there is a question mark as to what exactly is the problem on the UK side. If it is ‘we don’t want a border’ then it is
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