Brandon Lewis has once again acknowledged that a tweet he sent out in January, in which he claimed “there is no Irish Sea border”, is not entirely true.
“I fully accept that tweet hasn’t aged well,” the Northern Ireland secretary told Andrew Marr on Sunday when he appeared on the broadcaster’s eponymous BBC1 show.
Mr Marr had shown his guest a screenshot of the tweet and asked him to “straightforwardly accept that that is not true”.
Quick to defend both himself and the government, Mr Lewis responded: “On 1 January [when the tweet was published], we were very clear that we didn’t want a sea border.”
He went on to blame the EU for its implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol post-Brexit, which he branded “purist”.
“What’s happened since [1 January] is we’ve seen the implementation of the Protocol, the outworking of it, the purist way the EU want to see it, has meant that we’ve seen disruption in Northern Ireland.”
Asked repeatedly by Mr Marr if “right now” there is in fact an Irish border, Mr Lewis admitted while there was not a sea border by the traditional definition, there were barriers to trade.
“If you’ve travelled to Northern Ireland, as I do regularly, when you go through the airports, you’re not going through a border in the sense that anybody expects the border, but I’m not denying the fact there is big disruption in Northern Ireland to businesses and consumers.
“We need to rectify that and we will do.”
Pressed on whether it was an issue for ministers at home or in the European bloc to resolve, Mr Lewis said it was a “two-way thing”, adding that the “EU needs to show the flexibility that they keep talking about”.
His response to the tweet was similar in an interview with Belfast newspaper The News Letter back in March, when he framed it as something he truly believed at the time he wrote it.
“Looking to do the Protocol in a way that consumers in Northern Ireland effectively wouldn’t see it, wouldn’t feel it, wouldn’t have an issue with it,” he told the paper. “Clearly that is not the lived experience on the ground and that is why we’ve taken measures over the last couple of months with the EU and obviously we took the measures unilaterally last week.”
The cabinet minister’s latest remarks come amid ongoing talks between the UK and EU to reduce the burden of red tape required to move goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland’s Protocol, which was agreed by UK and EU officials as a way to keep the land border on the island of Ireland free-flowing, has created a series of new checks and restrictions – particularly on transporting GB produce into Northern Ireland.
A prohibition on chilled meats is due to come into force this week – the so-called “sausage war” – but the EU has indicated it is willing to grant a request from Boris Johnson’s administration to extend a temporary exemption period from the ban for a further three months.
The EU’s ambassador to the UK said last week the bloc was “turning regulations upside down to try and find a solution to this problem”.
“What we didn’t like to see was unilateral action by the government in breach of what we had agreed,” Joao Vale de Almeida added. “I hope that is behind us now, although the legal procedures must continue, and that we can find a new way of working on these issues.”
Tensions continue to mount in Northern Ireland as loyalists claim the trade arrangements have driven a constitutional wedge between them and the rest of the UK.
There are fresh concerns loyalist anger could result in violence during the country’s sensitive loyal order parading season during the summer. It comes after a string of riots in April – one of which saw a bus hijacked and set on fire in Belfast city centre – erupted due to unrest over the post-Brexit legislation.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission vice president, is due to appear before a Stormont committee on Monday to answer questions on the bloc’s stance on the Protocol.
