Britain is trying to ‘divide and conquer’ with Ireland and the EU. It’s a gamble that could backfire

THE European Union has our back. That is the big assumption that we, and particularly our Government, are making about Brexit.

We believe that despite the best efforts of the UK to persuade the EU to ditch the now-famous (or infamous to the British) border backstop – as a condition of the UK signing the withdrawal deal its government agreed with the EU but then couldn’t get past its own parliament – the EU will hold firm in our support.

The UK government’s tactics seem to be a classic example of the British trying to divide and conquer, to separate us from the rest of the EU.

The belief of some hardline Brexiteers is that continental Europe cannot afford the cost of a disruption to trade in goods and services that a hard Brexit would bring about. Faced with that reality, they believe the EU will insist Ireland drop our backstop demands and therefore the rest of the deal Theresa May negotiated will be approved by the British parliament. Crisis over.

Recession

There is a certain logic to that way of British thinking. Germany, in particular, wants to be able to continue selling cars freely, without tariffs, to the UK, a major market for its manufacturers. France has plenty of food and wine it wants to sell to the British. The loss of the British market could tip major economies in continental Europe into recession. Why put the Irish demands ahead of their own self-interest? Who in the EU really cares that much about a border on this island?

We haven’t always enjoyed the best of relationships with the EU either, especially since 2008. This is relevant to where we are now, so excuse the short diversion into recent history.

Our first sin was for our electorate to reject the terms of the mutually agreed Lisbon Treaty. Our government had to negotiate changes – sound familiar? – before the electorate endorsed the treaty in a second vote. Our second sin was the (highly disputed) circumstances of the bank guarantee of September 2008; whereas our government said it was acting under instruction, various institutions of the EU denied this. Then the European Commission and European Central Bank had to team up with the International Monetary Fund to provide the money to keep things ticking over, when the State effectively was on the verge of going bust, even if many here thought it was really Europe’s fault. Such things undermine relationships, especially when Troika members may have felt we were not sufficiently appreciative of the help we were being given.

On the other hand, there remains considerable disquiet in this State about the instruction that our government was not to ‘burn the bondholders’, to save the citizens a small fortune in the cost of bailing out the bust banks. ‘We took one for the team’, the team being the EU, as one minister famously described it. We thought we might get a refund at a future date, but we were to be disappointed.

You might think all of this would have poisoned relationships between Ireland and the EU. Remarkably, however, a combination of skilful diplomacy and shameless kowtowing has helped Ireland to reestablish its old cordial relationships with the EU; to date, at least, it seems our Government has done a remarkable job in persuading the European Commission and the member states of the European Council to take our side.

Destruction

Meanwhile, Britain is standing on the end of a diving board, putting a gun to its own head and threatening to shoot if it doesn’t get what it wants. It is gambling on a policy of mutually assured destruction that the facts don’t support.

The good news for Ireland is these are not two parties negotiating from positions of roughly equivalent strength and that we are part of the stronger side. The more clued-in British know they will be in deeper trouble than the EU if there is a no-deal Brexit.

The glib complacency of leading nodeal Brexiteers, believing the pain involved can be endured with a stiff upper lip, is not widely shared. The chairman of Tesco recently said ‘no deal is fine if people don’t mind living on Spam and tinned peaches’. There are genuine fears of shortages of food and medicines.

Honda may not be abandoning its Swindon manufacturing plant because of Brexit, as many had initially concluded when the news broke this week, but plenty of other multinational corporations, some of them even British, have already moved their assets out of Britain for fear of the impact of a no-deal Brexit. Ireland has been one of the major beneficiaries, especially in financial services, and only a fool would deny Britain is facing a major hit to its employment numbers and tax revenues. Europe, meanwhile, has plenty of reasons not to give in to the UK, and those have nothing to do with showing solidarity to Ireland’s legitimate needs regarding the peace process.

Influential

The EU (with Ireland influential) negotiated a deal with the UK on a Withdrawal Agreement in good faith. It was a lengthy and complicated negotiation and then the UK government failed to persuade its parliament of a key point that Britain had written itself. Why would the EU change its position on something that had been clearly outlined as early as December 2017 – and which did not lead to resignations at the time from ministers who later decried the backstop?

More importantly, however, the EU cannot be seen to buckle under pressure from a departing member state, not when it has plenty of major problems in maintaining discipline and control of remaining ones. Italy is in political turmoil and itching to cut loose of the fiscal requirements imposed by the EU. Hungary is behaving disgracefully in relation to immigrants – as Poland is in dictating to its judiciary – and will only take advantage if it sees the EU being bullied by the British when the latter is in a clearly weak position. The French government – with President Emmanuel Macron having lost his initial popularity and faced with the insurgence of the Yellow Vests and the rise of the National Front – cannot be seen to endorse a British victory over the EU.

We should always be prepared for the unexpected and the worst, which means our Government has to be vigilant to ensure the EU position does not change, that the support of Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Michel Barnier, as expressed many times in recent weeks, does not weaken, no matter what.

Our big fear remains what the British will do. The enormously adverse consequences of a no-deal Brexit should be sufficient to persuade the UK government, with parliamentary approval, to either ask for more time (which reduces their subsequent bargaining position further) or to endorse the Withdrawal Agreement, which allows for the future trading arrangements that should make the backstop redundant.

However, things are so crazy in British politics, it is possible there will be a failure to back down or to find an alternative that the EU could accept.

This could lead, almost by accident, despite a majority in the House of Commons really not wanting a no-deal Brexit, to the very thing that nobody wants: a no-deal Brexit. If that happens, it won’t be Ireland or the EU’s fault.