British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has warned that his government will not accept any framework for relations with the EU that involves «aligning itself» with its laws, thus ruling out a future scenario in which the UK resembles what is now Switzerland.
«I voted for Brexit, I believe in Brexit,» proclaimed Sunak, in a speech Monday to business leaders in Birmingham in which he again defended the «enormous benefits and opportunities» that, in his opinion, entails breaking definitively with the bloc that currently comprises 27 countries, according to the BBC.
In this sense, he has advocated «controlling» the borders and continue working to reach trade agreements «with the world’s fastest growing economies», a day after the newspaper ‘The Sunday Times’ published on Sunday that there are voices within the Government that do not see so bad a framework of relations such as the Swiss.
Switzerland, a country outside the EU, currently has an amalgam of 120 sectoral agreements under whose umbrella pivot relations with its main trading partner. For a decade, however, Brussels has been calling for a treaty that would bring all these agreements together and serve as a platform for dispute settlement.
London, for its part, still has several fronts open for Brussels, among them the agreement on the future relationship with Gibraltar and, especially, the application of the Northern Ireland protocol, a mechanism created ‘ex profeso’ to keep the Northern Irish within the common market and thus avoid a hard border in the Ulster. The British government has threatened to challenge it for introducing barriers to trade within the UK.
