UK ministers push ahead with plans to tear up post-Brexit trade deal

Ministers will push ahead with legislation to rip up Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland on Wednesday with no sign that any of the Tory leadership contenders plans to stop it.

The bill, which begins line-by-line scrutiny before passing to the House of Lords, has poisoned relations with the EU, raising fears of a trade war and the prospect of British scientists being excluded from a €95bn research programme.

The row over the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, which has brought local politics in the region to a standstill, loomed over the bonfires and parades held annually by unionists and loyalists on July 11-12 in celebration of their UK identity.

One pyre, near the staunchly loyalist Rathcoole estate in County Antrim, was decked with signs reading “Protocol must go” and “Compromise = sell out” as a band played “Land of Hope and Glory”.

Downing Street has said the bill, which would override parts of the protocol but which critics argue breaks international law, is “agreed policy” and will continue through the Commons, while outgoing prime minister Johnson leads a caretaker government.

The bill is expected to face tough opposition in the House of Lords, however, and none of the Tory leadership contenders — including former chancellor Rishi Sunak, trade minister Penny Mordaunt and foreign secretary Liz Truss — has committed to scrapping it.

Any suggestion that the next prime minister would water down Brexit or give in to Brussels is seen by senior Tories as a quick way to lose support.

Last month, Truss introduced the bill saying it would “fix” practical problems with the protocol that Brussels is refusing to solve.

She has argued that the protocol has created difficulties in supplying goods to Northern Ireland from Britain, and undermines the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between nationalists and unionists that ended three decades of conflict.

“I’d like to see Liz Truss get in. She’s tough on the protocol and what I call the dictatorship of the EU,” said Richard Bell, 79, a retired electrical engineer, watching a marching band in north Belfast.

“The protocol is a mess. They’re treating us as if we aren’t British,” he added as marchers commemorated the victory of the Protestant king William of Orange over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Sunak resisted supporting the Northern Ireland protocol bill while in cabinet, warning that it could lead to reprisals from the EU, but has so far remained quiet on the issue during the leadership campaign.

One ally said: “Rishi would let the bill go through, but there would be a different tone.” Sunak’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

Leadership contender Tom Tugendhat, regarded as the most pro-EU candidate, has claimed he would reset relations with Brussels and that he would keep the protocol as “negotiating leverage”. Challenger Jeremy Hunt, a former foreign secretary, has also said he would persevere with the bill.

Some unionists in Northern Ireland welcomed the prospect of an incoming prime minister who will be tough on the protocol, which has left Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market for goods and put a customs border in the Irish Sea.

“Boris Johnson betrayed us — he told us lies,” said one man by a bonfire in Larne more than 200ft high. “Everyone can remember [Johnson’s promise of] ‘unfettered access’ [for goods into Northern Ireland],” he added.

The Democratic Unionist party has paralysed local politics by boycotting the region’s power-sharing assembly and executive until the Irish Sea border goes.

James McCluskey, 33, who works in banking, feared that if “we give an inch, then an inch, then an inch . . . eventually I’ll be showing my passport to go to Scotland”. He supported the bill’s proposal for a “green lane” for goods coming from Great Britain and staying in Northern Ireland.

But while celebrating their Britishness on the “Twelfth”, many unionists professed little interest in who becomes their next prime minister. “I don’t think the Conservatives have anyone to put in that I would trust,” said Victor Molyneaux, 63, an HGV driver.