This deal could have been struck in 2021 – but the last thing Brexiters wanted was to get Brexit done
Is the grievance factory about to shut up shop at last? The Northern Ireland protocol is the last outpost of the once mighty manufacturing empire that produced, in industrial quantities, self-pitying narratives of Britons oppressed by Brussels. Now, perhaps, that assembly line has finally juddered to a halt.
The paradox of the Brexit project for its own advocates is that its very success has cut off the pipeline of complaint that fed their teeming springs of outrage. The protocol was the last excuse for throwing the old shapes, the one remaining arena in which the grand game of Euro-bashing could be played. It is not surprising that there are those – Boris Johnson, much of the European Research Group (ERG), part of the Democratic Unionist party – who can’t bear to part with it.
The most obvious thing about the deal announced at Windsor on Monday is that it shows that there was always a deal to be done. As far back as October 2021, the EU formally accepted that the way the protocol was being implemented had to be changed. It made no sense for goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland to be subjected to the same checks as those that were going on to the Republic and hence entering the EU.
Pretty much everything that has now been agreed was there to be negotiated two years ago: the sharing of advance data on exports, red and green lanes, flexibility on VAT and state aid rules, an enhanced role for the assembly in Belfast in scrutinising new single market regulations. All that was ever required was normal diplomacy at the high level and nerds lower down to do the nuts-and-bolts stuff.
So why was this not done? Why was this row allowed to become a standoff that paralysed politics in Northern Ireland, when everyone knows from bitter experience that its political vacuums are filled by malign forces?
First, because of the inability of the Brexit ultras to wean themselves off the “Those Eurocrats don’t like it up ’em” mode of international relations. The complete failure of bluster and posturing in the negotiation of the overall withdrawal agreement taught them nothing. They remained convinced that the way to get foreigners to do what you want is to shout louder.
Hence Boris Johnson’s idiotic Northern Ireland protocol bill. It said, in essence: scrap the protocol that Johnson himself begged you for or the UK will start a trade war with the EU, alienate the US, override its own most basic democratic procedures and declare its contempt for international law even while attacking Vladimir Putin for the same sin. This was never going to work, but it gave the zealots the thrill of one more excursion to the cliffs at Dover to shake their fists at the continent.
There was, though, an even more profound reason to avoid realistic negotiations on the protocol. The miasma of craziness that occludes this whole terrain emanates from the inconvenient truth that the protocol is, in horse-breeding parlance, by Johnson, out of the DUP. It was the DUP that made it inevitable by helping to bring down Theresa May, whose “backstop” agreement would have prevented the need for any controls on goods crossing the Irish Sea. And it was Johnson who, with his usual mastery of cynical opportunism, double-crossed the DUP, created the protocol, and used it to win an election.
But all of this had to be denied. The Frankensteins had to disown their monster. And the way to do that was to indulge in the fantasy that what they had done could somehow be undone. This mirage was conjured from two impossible demands: that the protocol be scrapped and that the European court of justice should cease to be the final arbiter of EU law as it applied to Northern Ireland’s operation of the