What the commentators said

Boris Johnson loves a “foreign quarrel”, said Nick Cohen in The Observer: it distracts voters from his Government’s failings at home. If the row is over a subject “as inconsequential as Channel Island shellfish, few need care”. But this time, the PM is playing with fire. The UK is insisting that the role the European Court of Justice plays in overseeing the Northern Ireland Protocol must go; that a back door be opened into its single market. Inevitably, the EU has refused. And by carrying on with his “perpetual war” Johnson risks inciting sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. If the EU suspends the Brexit deal, it will deliver “yet another haymaker” to the UK economy. Don’t underestimate the part which the EU has played in creating this mess, said Owen Polley in The Daily Telegraph. There is “growing anger” in loyalist communities, manifested in bus-burning and rioting. While such actions are deeply wrong, there’s a logic to them. Throughout the Brexit process, “the Dublin government, the EU and sympathetic Remainers” all hysterically encouraged the idea that a hard Irish land border would “invite terrorism by Irish republicans”. The implied threat of violence certainly worked to prevent a hard border. Now loyalists think: why can’t the same thing get rid of the sea border?

We have to acknowledge how crucial this issue is to the unionist community, said Ruth Dudley Edwards in the same paper. Exports from the Republic to Northern Ireland have jumped by 47% since the Protocol was implemented, and trade the other way rose by 61%. Many loyalists regard the Protocol as a kind of trojan horse designed to create an “all-Ireland economy”, and then a united Ireland. Even so, the crucial point is that Johnson signed up to this deal two years ago, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian – after assuring unionists he wouldn’t. Now he wants to ditch it. With mutual goodwill, most of the Protocol’s practical glitches could be ironed out. But Johnson’s “machismo” threatens to make the issue insoluble.