UK says ready to revise Brexit legislation after EU protests

LONDON: Britain's government said Monday it was ready to revoke clauses in Brexit legislation that have provoked legal action by the EU in the fraught end-game of talks on a future trade deal.

In parallel to the trade talks, senior minister Michael Gove and European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic have been meeting "constructively" on implementing the existing UK-EU divorce treaty, the UK government said.

"Discussions continue to progress and final decisions are expected in the coming days," it said, as Gove and Sefcovic held another round of talks in Brussels.

"If the solutions being considered in those discussions are agreed," the government said it was prepared to remove one clause and "deactivate" two others from its Internal Market Bill.

The bill has provoked an EU court process because the clauses would unilaterally rewrite the divorce treaty, by depriving Brussels of a say over future trading arrangements between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

The bill returned to debate in the British parliament's House of Commons on Monday with the offending clauses intact, after the upper House of Lords overwhelmingly voted last month to excise them, on the grounds they breached international law.

"But whilst we are hopeful of success, it is only prudent that until such a time as these discussions have successfully concluded, we retain these clauses in their current form as a fall-back option," business minister Paul Scully told MPs.

The government also planned on Tuesday to introduce another treaty-breaching bill to strip Brussels of any oversight over which goods are "at risk" of entering its single market via Northern Ireland from mainland Britain.

But it said the joint committee chaired by Gove and Sefcovic was making "good progress" on that front as well.

"In the light of those discussions, the government will keep under review the content of the forthcoming Taxation Bill," it said.

The provisions in both the UK bills are meant to take effect from January 1, after Britain leaves a post-Brexit transition period.

The government says they provide a "legal safety net" to regulate the UK's internal market and preserve stability in restive Northern Ireland, in the event of a "no deal" in the separate trade talks.

But both the EU and Britain's devolved governments in Scotland and Wales complain they amount to a bad-faith power grab by London that would imperil the UK's union and peace in Northern Ireland.

They have also attracted adverse attention from the incoming US administration of Joe Biden, who has warned that US-UK trade negotiations will be jeopardised if London does anything to undermine the peace.

An open border was a keystone of the US-brokered 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely ended more than 30 years of violence over British rule in Northern Ireland.