What the commentators said
How extraordinary that people are portraying the UK Government as the wrecker, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Its aim, after all, is only “the careful removal of some pointless checks on goods moving within the UK”. Trade between Great Britain and NI is “equivalent to 0.0008% of the EU’s GDP. Yet Brussels conducts around 20% of all its goods checks on this trade.” It acts as if the single market would be “imperilled by a Tesco chicken sandwich entering Donegal”. There’s no good reason why GB-imported goods that are clearly going to stay in Northern Ireland should be subjected to stringent checks.
These checks are causing real difficulties, said Annabel Denham in The Spectator. Some NI firms have given up trying to procure goods from the rest of the UK, in some cases leaving consumers unable to access particular products. And the impact will only grow if and when the EU ends the grace periods protecting specific British goods entering NI ports. The chairman of M&S, Archie Norman, this week described the vast amounts of paperwork involved in importing food products to the Republic of Ireland (“every piece of butter in a sandwich has to have an EU vet certificate”). He warned that comparable controls for NI would be disastrous.
The UK and EU can work to smooth out the most onerous aspects of the Protocol, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian, but they’re never going to be able to fix it to the Government’s satisfaction. Why? Because the underlying problem is Brexit itself. The reason so many people warned against leaving the single market is precisely that it was bound to create bothersome barriers to trade. That’s an inescapable feature of the deal. Another “inconvenient truth” is that Brexit is “incompatible with the spirit or letter of the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement”, said Sean O’Grady on The Independent. Whether the trade barrier was on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea, it was going to upset one community or the other. As this row continues, one thing we can be sure of is that Brexit won’t be “done” any time soon. “Just like the Irish question, into which Brexit has sadly and inevitably morphed.”