Boris Johnson:
Theresa May’s plan would mean that our leaders accept foreign rule for the first time since 1066
If the Brexit negotiations continue on this path they will end, I am afraid, in a spectacular political car crash. In the ensuing recriminations the road will be cordoned off. The investigative teams will roam around trying to work out how the British civil service – this purring Rolls-royce – could have come such a cropper. What distracted us? What caused us to swerve? How did Britain end up upside down in the ditch with all four wheels spinning lazily in the air?
To understand the origin of the disaster, you need to go back a few hundred paces to a fatal patch of oil on the road. It is called the Irish backstop. That was where the skid began. If we are to get out of this mess, and get the great British motor back on track, then we need to understand the Irish backstop, and how it is being used to coerce the UK into becoming a vassal state of Brussels.
It was on December 8 last year that the UK Government agreed that if the EU was not satisfied – at any point in the future – about the arrangements for the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, then, as a matter of law, Northern Ireland would have to be part of the EU customs union and large parts of its single market – accepting rules promulgated in Brussels in just the way that Ireland does. Some of us were told at the time (I remember it well) that this was only hypothetical, that it was just a form of words, that it would never be invoked. We were taken in.
In March the EU Commission published a protocol spelling it out: that until Brussels agreed otherwise, Northern Ireland would have to remain effectively part of the EU.
As it stands, this version of the Irish backstop is little short of an attempt to annex Northern Ireland. It would imply customs and regulatory controls between Britain and Northern Ireland, and therefore a border down the Irish Sea.
By invoking the 1998 Belfast Agreement, the backstop would transform that bilateral and nonjusticiable agreement between Britain and the Irish government into a justiciable agreement to be supervised and enforced by the EU. In that sense the protocol would amount to a change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status without its people’s consent – a total breach of the peace settlement. For Ulster Unionists of any description, for the Tory party, for anyone who cares about the Union between Britain and Northern Ireland, it is a monstrosity.
Having agreed the backstop in December, the UK Government has then of course protested, and said – quite properly, but a little late – that it will not accept any such threat to the Union. But instead of contesting the absurd assertion that a frictionless border must mean keeping Northern Ireland effectively in the EU, we have responded by going one further. We are now saying that if Brussels cannot be satisfied on our plans for the Irish border, then we are volunteering that the whole of the UK must remain effectively in the customs union and large parts of the single market until Brussels says otherwise.
That is also the essence of the Chequers proposals. They mean that the UK will become a rules-taker not just in goods and agri-foods, but almost certainly in the environment and social policy and many other legislative areas. Far from banishing the role of the increasingly erratic European Court of Justice, the Chequers proposals mean the ECJ is in essence back in charge.
The whole thing is a constitutional abomination, and if Chequers were adopted it would mean that, for the first time since 1066, our leaders were deliberately acquiescing in foreign rule. There is no other country – large or small – that would accept such an arrangement; and yet the UK is proud to have an ancient parliamentary democracy and the fifth biggest economy in the world.
If Chequers is utterly unacceptable in principle, the practical consequences are even worse: they mean that UK business and innovators are perpetually vulnerable to rules that may not be in their interest, and may be deliberately inimical to their interest, and yet over which we have no say. By leaving us effectively in the customs union, and with no ability to negotiate our regulatory framework, we are unable to do proper free trade deals.
Chequers prevents us from deviating or innovating in so many key policy areas that the advantages of Brexit are simply removed. Unlike EU membership, where we had the right to leave, the backstop is eternal. The proposals must be scrapped, and the answer is to go back to the site of the skid. As the European Research Group pointed out last week in their excellent paper, there are plenty of ways of allowing for gradual regulatory divergence between the UK and Ireland, but without physical checks at the NI border. Any extra checks can be done away from the border, with trusted trader and self-assessment schemes, and plain enforcement of the law at warehouses and points of sale.
The Prime Minister says that any such checks or controls – even light touch and away from the border – are against the Belfast Agreement. There is no basis for this claim. There is nothing whatever in the text of the agreement providing for the removal of customs or regulatory controls, and certainly nothing to stop the development of sensible technical solutions that would keep goods and people flowing completely freely, and yet take Northern Ireland, and the rest of the UK, out of the EU.
The block on any such progress is the Irish backstop, which not only forbids infrastructure at the border (which is in any case unnecessary) but also any “related checks or controls” away from the border. That is absurd. Both versions of the backstop are disastrous. One threatens the Union; the other version – and its close cousin, Chequers – keep us effectively in the EU, as humiliated rules-takers.
We need to challenge the assumptions of both these Irish backstops, or we are heading full throttle for the ditch with a total write-off of Brexit. We are straining at the gnat of the Irish border problem – in fact we haven’t even tried to chew the gnat – and we are swallowing the camel of EU membership in all but name.