We must prepare for Article 16 or face defeat on the Protocol
The Prime Minister should be prepared to turn Britain into what the EU feared most: a Singapore moored 20 miles off Calais
After Covid restrictions, petrol crises and climate change extremists blocking roads and letting down tyres, the last thing anyone wants is to upend our trade relations with the EU. Unfortunately, that is what triggering Article 16 would entail (the EU side has even threatened a trade war) and it is an eventuality for which the Prime Minister must prepare. If Boris Johnson fails to do so, he will utterly undermine his own position in trying to renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol.
That lesson was surely learned during Theresa May’s failed Brexit negotiations. She started out well, declaring that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. But then she went on to make no preparations for a “no deal” exit, making it plain to Michel Barnier and his team that under no circumstances would she ever allow it to happen. Barnier calculated, correctly, that this would allow him to treat May with contempt and lined up Britain for what the then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson called “punishment beatings”.
In his own Brexit negotiations as Prime Minister in the autumn of 2019, Johnson was more serious about preparing for no deal, though the fact that he agreed to erect an internal border between Britain and Northern Ireland is the reason we are in such a mess now.
He should not make the same error of allowing the EU to dictate terms again. Rather he should prepare for the economic dislocation and likely trade war that would be precipitated by triggering Article 16 by getting ready to do everything that the EU would least want us to do.
This would involve an emergency Budget to slash taxes and deregulate – we have hardly varied from any EU laws yet, which raises the question of why Johnson was so keen to leave in the first place. He should also target EU companies specifically with tax breaks to encourage them to relocate, and offer fast-track visas to any EU citizen who has a wealth-creating, jobcreating business. In short, he should be prepared to turn Britain into what the EU feared most: a Singapore moored 20 miles off Calais.
Britain should be laying the diplomatic groundwork, too. The idea that we would be somehow breaking international law by dumping the Protocol is bunk. Article 16 was written into the withdrawal agreement so that either side could unilaterally suspend the agreement in whole or in part if it was found to be causing “economic, societal or environmental difficulties”. This is clearly the case in Northern Ireland – and the Government, including our ambassadors around the world, should not be afraid to say so.
As for Joe Biden, who would be sure to kick up a stink, Johnson needs to ask the US President every time he opens his mouth on the subject: how would he feel if some other country had the power to force him to put up a hard border between Delaware and the rest of the US?
No one should want a trade war with the EU to happen. But to prepare for that outcome now is the only way we are going to dig Northern Ireland out of the deep hole into which it has been dumped.