Since her appointment as foreign secretary in September, Liz Truss has said little about the European Union. Her speeches exalt the UK as the broker of a global “network of liberty”, listing alliances with scarcely any reference to the club of democracies on Britain’s continental doorstep. That omission partly reflects the ideological temper of the Conservative party, to which Ms Truss is highly sensitised. It also expressed divisions of labour in the cabinet when David Frost was in charge of post-Brexit negotiations with Brussels. But since Lord Frost’s resignation, the European portfolio has returned to the Foreign Office. Silence on the subject is no longer an option for the secretary of state.
Her first intervention has been to restate Britain’s readiness to trigger article 16 of the withdrawal agreement, suspending its operation, if grievances regarding the Northern Ireland protocol are not satisfied. The terms demanded by Lord Frost for a renegotiation still stand.
The pugnacious tone disappointed those who had hoped that a change in personnel indicated a new willingness to compromise. That prospect is not entirely lost. Ms Truss had to signal continuity in the negotiating position. Anything else would have caused a commotion on the Tory benches and destabilised an already wobbly government. That does not rule out a pragmatic shift in the coming months. The foreign secretary will not want Brexit to consume all of her political bandwidth, and the most efficient way to avoid that is to take her finger off the article 16 trigger. » | Editorial | Wednesday, December 22, 2021
EU und Grossbritannien einigen sich auf Fischfangmengen »
