The cost of Boris Johnson’s Brexit drive just might be a dis-united Kingdom
For Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of the prime selling points of his Brexit agreement with the European Union is that Northern Ireland will not be legally severed from the customs territory of Britain.
“It means,” he said on Thursday, “the U. K. leaves whole and entire.”
That’s assuming Johnson’s proposed agreement gets the goahead in the British Parliament on Saturday. The last- minute divorce deal will face a deeply divided parliament with opponents trying to force a delay to Brexit and another referendum. If Johnson loses the vote and doesn’t get approval for no deal by Saturday, he is required by law to write a letter to the EU requesting more negotiating time, delaying Brexit until Jan. 31, 2020. But if the deal succeeds, where former prime minister Theresa May’s three proposals failed, it will proceed to the next steps in an attempt to leave the EU by the Oct. 31 deadline.
On Friday, Johnson was optimistic the agreement would pass and the United Kingdom, in its entirety, would leave.
How long it would stay that way is another matter.
Among the most profound consequences of Johnson’s proposed Brexit deal, analysts said, is that it could strengthen the centrifugal forces that were already pulling apart the United Kingdom. Scotland’s nationalists said the plan would galvanize them to seek another referendum on Scottish independence, while Irish nationalists quietly welcomed it as one more step toward a reunified Ireland.
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party vowed to vote against Johnson’s plan in Parliament, saying it would drive a “coach and horses” through the Good Friday Agreement. That peace treaty enshrined Britain’s sovereignty over Northern Ireland, unless a majority of people favour uniting with Ireland, and it set up a power- sharing arrangement between unionists and nationalists.
Even before Johnson’s deal, however, Brexit had exposed the fractures in the United Kingdom. Voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland both opted to stay in the European Union in the 2016 referendum; those in England voted to leave. The years of tortuous negotiations over the terms of Britain’s departure have only deepened the alienation of many in both places.
“It cannot be right that Scotland alone is facing an outcome it did not vote for — that is democratically unacceptable and makes a mockery of claims that the U. K. is in any way a partnership of equals,” Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, said on Thursday.
“It is clearer than ever that the best future for Scotland is one as an equal, independent European nation,” she said. “That is a choice I’m determined to ensure is given to the people of Scotland.”
The last time the Scots had that choice — a referendum in 2014 — they voted against leaving Britain by 55 per cent to 44 per cent. Analysts said the outcome could be reversed in a second vote, given the economic benefits that Scotland is likely to lose by leaving the EU along with the rest of Britain.
Even in Wales, which voted to leave Europe in 2016, there is evidence of a budding independence movement. While polls rarely show support for it rising above 25 per cent, the chaotic politics of Brexit in London have raised doubts among some Welsh.
The situation in Northern Ireland is more complicated. There is less of a push to break away, though a recent poll by Michael Ashcroft, a British pollster and former Conservative Party official, showed that a bare majority of people there would vote to leave the U.K., if given a choice.
That is partly a function of demographics: Catholics, who tend to be nationalist, are growing more rapidly as a percentage of the population than Protestants, who tend to be unionist. But it also reflects tensions over Brexit, particularly since the arrival of Johnson and his threat to leave the EU, even without a deal, by the end of October.
Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party that once served as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, said that if Johnson carried out that threat, Northern Ireland should hold a referendum.
“People from across this society, even those of a British identity, are now seriously questioning whether there are any merits of staying within the Union after Brexit,” Michelle O’neill, the deputy leader of Sinn Fein, said during a debate at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, England last month.
In that regard, Johnson’s deal is a mixed blessing. On one hand, Northern Ireland would remain legally part of the U.K.’S customs territory, which would avoid the need for checkpoints on its border with the Irish Republic.
On the other, it would stay closely aligned with a maze of European rules and regulations, and there would be customs checks between Britain and Northern Ireland. The border, rather than cutting across the island of Ireland from east to west, would run north to south through the Irish Sea.
The goal is to allow nearly seamless trading to continue between the north and Ireland, a member of the EU. The question is whether even that level of symbolic differentiation, over time, will change the attitudes of the people, shifting their orientation from London to Dublin.
Some of that has already occurred in the two decades since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended years of sectarian violence and turned checkpoints manned by British soldiers into a distant memory. The economies of north and south are now thoroughly integrated and public agencies serve the whole island.
“We’re accustomed to all- Ireland boards,” said Monica McWilliams, an academic and former politician in Belfast who was involved in the Good Friday negotiations.
She noted that Johnson’s agreement would have a symbolic impact, creating a tangible distinction between Northern Ireland and Britain — “a border down the Irish Sea.” That is important in a place where cultural identity and questions of constitutional sovereignty can matter as much as economics.
Still, like most experts, Mcwilliams does not predict a referendum on Irish unification for perhaps a decade or more.
Some Irish experts argue that the Democratic Unionists should have embraced Johnson’s plan. If he had carried out his threat to leave the EU without any deal the pressure for Northern Ireland to split from the Union would have been far stronger.
The North would have been isolated and its economy badly damaged, which is the outcome feared by the Scots. Instead, Northern Ireland could now benefit from an arrangement in which both Britain and the EU have an incentive to make sure its economy stays competitive.
“You only have to look at Scotland’s jealousy toward Northern Ireland,” said Bobby Mcdonagh, who served as Ireland’s ambassador to London.
Even Sinn Fein officials have reacted warmly to the deal, in part because it does not give the Democratic Unionist Party a veto over staying aligned with the EU after a few years, as earlier proposals would have.
The Democratic Unionists, Mcdonagh noted, were unhappy with drawing any distinctions between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U. K. because they viewed it as a first step toward sundering the two.
In that case, he said, the unionists “should have voted against Brexit to begin with.”
It cannot be right that Scotland alone is facing an outcome it did not vote for.