It just looks like Frosty's highly political approach may have been holding things up.
So if Truss doesn't fall down that particular rabbit hole, progress can be made. From the FT's interview with Sefovic on Friday:
Quote:
It has also offered an “express lane” for goods heading to Northern Ireland that were unlikely to leak across the border into Ireland and the wider single market.
It claims that the changes would cut customs checks in half and health checks by 80 per cent, although the UK has questioned those figures, with the result that talks have hardly progressed.
Sefcovic said he could guarantee those reductions but “everything depends on the quality of the safeguards” from the UK, such as giving the EU real-time access to customs data.
“Can the trusted trade scheme really be trusted? What will happen in the case where we have some kind of public health alert, some spoilt shrimp or some kind of damaged goods that need to be pulled off the shelves?
“Why are you telling us that putting a sticker on a food product ‘only for the UK’ is a huge problem when you have a sticker on everything on the shelves that you can take two for the price of three or there is a discount? What is so cosmically difficult about that?”
He called for an end to “political dramas”. “Ninety per cent of the problems coming to us . . . could be solved at a technical level.
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https://www.ft.com/content/a5cf97bb-...8-eb29233a5fe8