Boris Johnson’s long-running feud over with Brussels over how to manage a post-Brexit Northern Ireland has entered a volatile phase.
| Britain and the European Union are staring down the barrel of a damaging trade war, as both sides refuse to blink in a long-running feud over post-Brexit Northern Ireland.
In response, the EU looks set to restart legal action against Britain for breaking the treaty’s “Northern Ireland Protocol”, after pausing the proceedings last October to allow negotiations to continue. The manoeuvring and threats on both sides are partly an attempt to up the stakes and force the other side to blink, in a game of chicken that will continue to play out in slow motion.
In the Brexit deal of 2019, Mr Johnson agreed that Northern Ireland should stay in the EU single market, to avoid jeopardising a fragile peace with a potentially combustible land border.But this inexorably meant there would have to be a maritime customs border between Northern Ireland and the British mainland - an outcome Mr Johnson agreed to on paper but never accepted politically.
The British government says it has to fix the system because the anger of the DUP and other unionist parties is threatening the peace deal, known as the Good Friday Agreement, that the warring unionists and republicans signed in 1998.
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