The post you are reporting:
Courtesy of the Times - I think this is just a bluff.
The European Union has demanded that Britain effectively hand over sovereignty of Northern Ireland to Brussels if it cannot find a solution to the Irish border question. In an uncompromising legal text published today, the Commission also calls on the UK to make Europe’s highest court the ultimate arbiter of any Brexit disputes. The EU has also rejected British proposals that cover the transition period. The document states that EU citizens arriving after March 2019 must have identical rights to those already living in the UK.
It also gives the European Commission powers to suspend Britain’s access to the single market unilaterally if Brussels believes the UK has broken the terms of the agreement. All the demands will be rejected by the government, potentially jeopardising the chances of signing a transition agreement at next month’s European summit. However the text may also cause concern in some European capitals with worries that the Commission’s uncompromising line could be counter-productive. The hard-hitting document sets out in legal terms to establish a “common regulatory area” between the north and south of Ireland covering customs, VAT, energy and product standards if no deal is agreed. Britain would be expected to carry out customs checks on all goods crossing the Irish Sea while Northern Ireland would be “considered to be part of the customs territory of the Union”.
While the Irish government welcomed the move, the Commission’s tough line was angrily rejected by the DUP, which accused the EU of trying to use Northern Ireland as a port to keep the whole of the UK in the single market and the customs union. “The EU have been trying to manoeuvre the negotiations to ensure that the United Kingdom as a whole stays within the single market and customs union and have been using — or abusing — Northern Ireland to try and bring that situation about,” Sammy Wilson, the party’s Brexit spokesman, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “It seems that the EU have made it quite clear that the only option they are interested in is regulatory alignment which would either remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, separate us from our main market and politically create an issue where we are separated from the rest of the United Kingdom, or else force the whole of the United Kingdom to stay in the single market and the customs union.”