Sajid Javid is a potential candidate to be the new leader of the Conservatives.
UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid has said that Britain should pay the Irish government half a billion pounds to break the Brexit deadlock over the Northern Ireland border issue.
Mr Javid wants the money to be used to set up new technology-driven border checks to avoid keeping the “UK locked to EU rules”.
Javid believes that an arrangement on the border issue can be found and that it’s Britain’s job to pay for it.
Speaking with the Mail On Sunday, Javid, who is one of the MPs in the running for Conservative Party leadership, has said that it’s Britain’s responsibility to pay for it and that it it will take “hundreds of millions of euros, no one really knows because it hasn’t been done before”.
“I think it’s morally justified to pay for that because we both have signed the Good Friday Agreement, we are both absolutely committed to peace on the island of Ireland and – given that we voted to leave and that’s what’s changing the status quo on the island of Ireland – I think it’s morally right that we say, ‘look, we’ll pay because we’ve caused this’,” he said.
Mr Javid believes that the potential economic benefits of Brexit would help to pay for this arrangement.
“If we get a Brexit deal in the next few months there will be a mini- economic boom, it will immediately have an economic impact,” he said.
In 2018, a House of Commons committee said it had not seen any technical solutions anywhere in the world that would remove the need for physical infrastructure at the border.
The committee stated it “had no visibility of any technical solutions, anywhere in the world, beyond the aspirational, that would remove the need for physical infrastructure at the border”.
A few months ago, it was reported that the possibility of a technological solution to the border issue could be more than a decade away, according to a Home Office document.
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