Biden makes clear that a US-UK trade deal is dependent on NO hard border in Ireland
We are now less than seven weeks from the US Presidential election and the national and swing state polling points to Joe Biden becoming the next President. So his intervention on the impact of what is resolved over Brexit and the Irish question is critical. This cannot be put on one side.
The problem is that the question of the status of Northern Ireland was always going to be difficult if the UK left the EU. The whole essence of the Good Friday Agreement was based on both the UK and the Republic being within the EU and therefore the border issue could be fudged in order to meet the apparently irreconcilable demands of the UK wanting the province to remain while apparently meeting the contradictory objectives of Dublin.
This was never really addressed at the 2016 Brexit referendum which in retrospect should not have been allowed to happen while this remained unresolved.
The hope of many US Democrats of Irish descent is to create a united Ireland something the loyalist community in Northern Ireland remain totally opposed to. The DUP don’t want anything the makes their province separate from the rest of the UK.
For Johnson and his ministers it is absolutely vital that outside the EU the UK has a trade deal with the US.
It is very hard seeing this resolved by the end of the transition period on December 31st.