It’s all about the wording in the Irish Brexit deal

Sky news are reporting that they “understand” that the UK and EU have agreed to “regulatory alignment”. This has been the hot topic of the wording of the agreement because it interprets the future relationship between the North and South and marks the difference between whether the North efficitively stays within the EU custons union, among other things. An alignment would mean that the regs in the North will run parallel to those in the South, which is what May will try to do with all the other current EU rules that affect everything from trade to regulation.

My feeling is that there will be rules put in place to basically keep the status quo in Ireland but there will be restrictions in place to stop businesses from using it as a backdoor/passport into/out of Europe. For example, a firm who has operations in both the North and South won’t be able to switch goods across the border for forwarding on to other countries, just to bypass any trade restrictions that might be in place between the UK and the rest of Europe.

Ryan Littlestone

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