British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak won the backing of parliament on Wednesday for a key element of a reworked post-Brexit deal on Northern Ireland despite a lack of support from the province’s biggest unionist party and some of his lawmakers.
Sunak has tried to end years of wrangling over Brexit by revisiting one of the trickiest parts of the negotiations – to ensure smooth trade to Northern Ireland without creating a hard border with Britain or with European Union-member Ireland.
He agreed with the EU to introduce the “Stormont brake”, aimed at offering Northern Ireland more control over whether to accept any new EU laws, as part of the so-called Windsor Framework of measures.
But in Wednesday’s vote in the lower house of parliament, those he most wanted to win over – Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Conservative eurosceptics in the European Research Group (ERG) and his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – said they would rebel.
Despite the opposition, Sunak won the vote by 515 to 29, suggesting that several in his Conservative Party had abstained on the vote.
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Sunak and his ministers had urged lawmakers to support the brake.
“The Stormont brake is at the heart of the (Windsor) Framework,” Northern Ireland minister Chris Heaton-Harris told parliament ahead of the vote. “It restores practical sovereignty for the United Kingdom as a whole and the people of northern Ireland in particular.”
The brake enables Britain to prevent new EU laws applying to goods in Northern Ireland if asked to do so by a third of lawmakers in the province’s devolved legislature.
The ERG has described the measure as “practically useless” and the DUP complains that it does not apply to existing EU law.
