Northern Ireland stuck in Brexit fudge
Boris Johnson’s bodged Brexit deal must now be reckoned with. Emily Hohler reports
“Two of Boris Johnson’s most reckless chickens are coming home to roost,” says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. In order to “get Brexit done” and “topple” Theresa May, he told Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that he would not allow a border in the Irish Sea. “He promptly allowed one”, signing the Northern Ireland Protocol to that effect.
Following Northern Ireland Assembly elections on 5 May – in the midst of a cost of living crisis and with public services under huge pressure – an “enraged” DUP is refusing to take part in the power-sharing government until that border goes. Johnson is now “threatening to unilaterally renege on the protocol, in turn enraging the EU… Precisely this trap was built into hard Brexit from day one. Everyone knew it.” The question is what new “fudge” Johnson can “conceivably fashion” to extract himself from this “mess”.
The difficulty lies not with the substance of the protocol, says Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. Economically, Northern Ireland (which now enjoys “unique dual access to both the EU and UK markets”, points out The Daily Telegraph’s James Crisp) is outperforming the UK. Nor does the difficulty lie with majority opinion in Northern Ireland: the 5 May elections delivered “53 members in favour of the protocol and only 37 against”.
The problem is with the unionists, who favoured Brexit in 2016 and whose parties only received 40% of the vote earlier this month. Why does our government want to give fewer than 350,000 unionist voters and a “vastly smaller number of potential troublemakers the power to break the withdrawal agreement with the EU”, even though Britain’s interests lie in the “best and most stable relations with the EU, our biggest trading partner”?
Return of the Brexit wars
Quite, says Neale Richmond in The Times. British government claims that the elections prove the protocol isn’t sustainable are “categorically false”. Westminster is trying to appeal to its “pro-Brexit base” with these “political games”, but by threatening “once again” to “breach international law”, it is damaging Britain’s reputation in Northern Ireland, the EU, the US and elsewhere.
“Nobody can credibly claim” that the protocol is working perfectly, says The Daily Telegraph. Moreover, the preference remains a negotiated settlement; to “fix” not “scrap” the deal. Plus, Brussels is unlikely to act until the law is passed or takes effect, which is likely to take months and will face opposition in the Lords, says James Crisp. The bill also contains an “olive branch”, an “explicit” override clause so that it can be instantly replaced if an agreement with Brussels is reached. At present, the EU carries out checks on non-EU goods and animals entering its territory, which, argues the British government, is having a “chilling effect on trade from the rest of the UK”, Northern Ireland’s main trading partner. M&S chairman Archie Norman said 700 pages of forms have to be filled to get two trucks to Northern Ireland, requiring 160 manhours. The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, wants a “green lane” for goods destined for Northern Ireland, for border control to be under British jurisdiction and for Westminster to apply the same tax rate changes in Northern Ireland and the UK.
Insiders say Truss’s EU counterpart, Maros Sefcovic, has already said he is willing to “agree to significant compromises to eliminate all customs and food safety checks”, say Joe Barnes and Nick Gutteridge in The Daily Telegraph. The “key deadline” is 28 October, says Adam Payne on Politics Home. The DUP has to agree to form a government by that date. Expect talks to continue into the summer and “another Brexit cliff edge” then.