The UK is “indefinitely committed” to the Irish backstop if it comes into force, the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, has told MPs as he explained to them the legal advice he gave the government on the planned Brexit deal.
Answering questions from MPs in what Downing Street said was the first such appearance by an attorney general in the Commons in decades, Cox also said there was no unilateral right for the UK to pull out of the backstop, which would come into force to prevent a hard Irish border if no permanent trade deal was reached.
“Let me make no bones about the Northern Ireland protocol. It will subsist, we are indefinitely committed to it if it came into force,” Cox said. “There is no point in my trying or the government trying to disguise that fact.”
Cox said that the main calculation was the “political imperative” of either entering into the agreement or not. “That is a calculated risk that each member of this house is going to have to weigh up against different alternatives,” he said.
He dismissed suggestions that no other similar treaty existed that would endure so permanently. “There are hundreds throughout the world … The whole Vienna convention has entire sections on permanent treaties,” he said.
But Cox told MPs there was no legal basis in article 50 for the backstop to be permanent and it would be “vulnerable to legal challenge” if it ever came to pass that Northern Ireland remained in both the EU and the UK.
Rivals would “beat a path to the European commission” and would win if the backstop was permanent, he said, because it would give Northern Ireland the unique and anti-competitive position of being able to trade with the EU single market and the UK market with no strings attached.
In his statement, Cox urged MPs to have patience, saying that untangling 45…
