Content of legislation to be tabled next week depends on progress with EU in talks, sources say
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| Britain is likely to have a Finance bill |
The UK is scheduled to table its much-awaited finance bill next week but is expected to remove the controversial clauses expected to end the Brexit withdrawal agreement if the trade deal is struck first.
The European Union has warned that trade negotiations will be
immediately pulled if the government moves ahead with a second batch of
legislation to give it a unilateral right to withdraw from the agreement signed
in January.
"If it violates the withdrawal agreement, then this the curtain is no deal," a senior Brussels source said.
However, government sources have said that the content of the
bill depends on progress in trade negotiations, which is now in the
make-or-break phase.
If a deal happens this week, Klaus is "very unlikely if we are in the world of a business deal", he said.
The bill has been on the cards since September and it was
expected that the internal market bill would include several clauses
incorporating controversial measures - announced by three former prime
ministers and largely rejected by the House of Lords last month, the
government's entry. Fearing it was designed to break international law.
If the government goes ahead, the Finance Bill, with its controversial clauses would be seen by the European Union as a fiery act if trade and security negotiations were ongoing - but there is no hope for such results in Brussels.
Sources in Britain said the next three to five days were
important, with the expectation that even if no deal was revealed before
Friday, it would happen over the weekend.
The proposed Finance Bill would have given a minister unilateral power to decide that goods exported from Britain to Northern Ireland would be considered at "risk" of entering the Republic of Ireland.
Such "at-risk" goods would attract tariffs - although the tax would be redeemed if it could be proved that the items had stayed in Northern Ireland.
The issue is being discussed by the joint EU-UK committee implementing the withdrawal agreement. But a trade deal giving "zero tariffs and zero quotas" on goods being traded between Britain and the European Union would solve the problem completely, leaving the government without the need for related clauses in the Finance Bill.
A separate strand of negotiations being run by the UK-EU Joint a committee headed by Michael Gov and Marrow Šefčovič is making good progress on the issue, and the free movement of food between Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
The UK government had argued that the Brexit clause in both the
Finance Bill and the Internal Market Bill was the necessary safety net to guarantee
unchanged trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, in the event that
trade negotiations collapsed.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Irish Taoiseach, Michael
Martin said: "We are now really in the endgame if a deal is to happen this
week."
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