‘Their self determination is up to them’: Pelosi confirms no chance of US-UK trade deal if Good Friday accord damaged
Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated that the US Congress would block any potential US trade deal with the UK if Boris Johnson unilaterally violates the Good Friday Agreement that allows an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
“How do you walk away from an international agreement?” Ms Pelosi said of the prime minister’s potential move.
"How do you trust [negotiating with] that?" she asked rhetorically at a press conference on Thursday.
The speaker echoed comments from other House Democrats this week that the UK is of course free to chart its own course in terms of pulling back from the European Union. But if the country goes about that process in a way that upsets existing agreements involving the US, which is a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement, that would have ramifications beyond the UK’s control.
“Their self determination is up to them. Our trade relations are up to us,” Ms Pelosi said.
"The people of the UK have determined their course of action. That's up to them. But it is not up to them to think that they will be rewarded [with a new US-UK trade deal] if they mess with the Good Friday accords," she said.
Ms Pelosi said she has made her position on the matter very clear for a year now.
"It's a very simple message. They know it. They've heard it... This is not anything we've hidden under a bush: There will be no bilateral US-UK agreement if... the Good Friday accords with regard to the border are changed."
On Wednesday, as Mr Johnson’s government continued hashing out an agreement with the EU over the UK’s departure from the union, it released an Internal Market Bill that would effectively subject the Northern Ireland-Ireland border to regular customs checks, a break from the recent tradition of the free flow of commerce between the UK province and the independent republic.
Politicians in the UK and abroad who are against the move fear that closing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would incite a return to Republican and Loyalist violence that ended in the late-1990s.
Such a scenario could lead to the remilitarisation of that border and chaos with regard to the political future of Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill has said the Johnson government’s move would be "a treacherous betrayal" inflicting "irreversible harm."
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