EU Referendum


Brexit: "whatever it takes"


14/06/2021




The legacy media has written more about Northern Ireland over the last couple of weeks than it wrote throughout the entire referendum campaign. That would not be difficult, though. Barely anything was written about the province.

Certainly, I wrote very little and what I did was based on the assumption that the UK would take the "Norway option", and stay within the EEA. That would not have solved all the problems but, with a few tweaks, it would have been close to business at usual for Northern Ireland.

Once Theresa May decided we were to leave the Single Market, confirmed during her notorious Lancaster House speech, then the writing was on the wall. We were left with three possible options, and it didn't take a genius to work it out.

Mrs May, of course, thought she could long-finger the decision as which way to go. Her "backstop" and the "Strasbourg Agreement" left open the possibility of her negotiators coming up with something, then unspecified, which could keep the show on the road.

When Johnson ditched May's deal and substituting his own, turning the "backstop" into a "frontstop", any chance of an off-piste deal – however remote – evaporated.

In theory, there were three possible options available before Johnson did his deal. For the first and most obvious, he could have reversed May's Lancaster House decision, and gone back for the Efta/EEA option. But that was never going to happen. Even if he had wanted to go that direction, the ERG would not have allowed it.

With Johnson determined on a clean break from the EU's regulatory union, and a hard land border was out of the question, that left either the option of a regulatory border between mainland Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or the prospect of convincing the Irish government that the regulatory border should be moved to between Ireland and the rest of the EU. And the latter was never going to happen.

Before he had even let his new team loose, though, the new prime minister had already decided on the only practical option available to him – the regulatory border between GB and Northern Ireland. It has been suggested that he thought could then refine, or even alter the deal during the TCA negotiations. But if that was even a possibility, it never happened.

Given the Walter Mitty demeanour of Johnson, though, and his well-known inability to handle detail, it is conceivable that he didn't know what he had agreed, especially in the light of his assurance that there would be no border checks on goods from NI to GB.

However, then and on other occasions, he gave no commitments on what would happen with GB to NI trade, suggesting that he was aware that there would be some issues that he would have to deal with.

But then along came the Internal Market Bill, breaking international law, but only "in a very specific and limited way", which had Johnson in September last year, asserting that the UK had only agreed to do some "light-touch checks" on goods arriving in Northern Ireland, in case they should go on to Ireland.

There is nothing in the Protocol, of course, that would suggest – or even allow for – light-touch checks but, on the assumption that these would prevail, Johnson maintained that we had an "excellent deal", on which basis we had left the EU.

It had apparently taken nearly a year for the intelligence to percolate through to Johnson's fragile brain that the EU was intending to use "an extreme interpretation of the Northern Ireland protocol to impose a full-scale trade border down the Irish Sea".

Any dispassionate reading of the protocol, though, would not support Johnson's reading, which lead to that famous intervention by Ed Miliband, when he accused the prime minister of not having read the protocol – which is most likely the case.

The deal that Johnson had told us was a triumph, the deal he said was oven-ready, the deal on which he fought and won the general election, Miliband scorned, had the prime minister coming to the House to declare that his "flagship achievement" was "contradictory and ambiguous".

In full flow, Miliband had rounded off with a superb burst of rhetoric, declaring that there was only one person responsible for the deal. It was Johnson's deal, "his mess... his failure". For the first time in his life, it was time to take responsibility. And thus Miliband concluded: "It is time to ’fess up: either he was not straight with the country about the deal in the first place, or he did not understand it".

But since then, we have seen anything but that admission of guilt, with the Johnson administration resorting to a unilateral extension of the "grace period", which has had the Commission going through the process of launching infringement proceedings.

If he expected any quarter at the G7 meeting, therefore, Johnson must be deeper up his own fundamentals that we can possibly have imagined. Predictably, he has got short shrift from Macron, who has declared that he was "well aware" of "incoherences" in the protocol when he signed up to it.

With tangible signs of patience wearing thin, Macron went on to insist that he understood perfectly the UK's concerns about its sovereignty. "France has never allowed itself to question British sovereignty, the integrity of British territory and the respect of its sovereignty", he said.

"Brexit, I'd like to remind you", he added, "is the child of British sovereignty and has generated thousands of hours of work for European leaders. So we know very well what British sovereignty is. I don't think there’s any other country whose sovereignty other countries have spent so much time respecting. So we are respectful".

With a perspicacity one can only applaud (for its depth of irony), the Guardian notes "a sign that the two sides remain on a collision course", when the French president reiterated the EU's insistence that the UK must implement the checks that it signed up to carrying out.

"Over a number of years after Brexit, we established certain rules, a protocol agreement, and also a commercial treaty. We just want them to be respected, seriously, calmly, professionally. That's all," Macron says.

We are now told that talks between officials are expected to resume this week in a renewed attempt to devise a practical solution to the standoff. Both sides, though, are said to be insisting that the ball is in the other's court.

As I remarked yesterday, though, Johnson has left the UK without the wherewithal fully to implement the protocol, so he must either go crawling to the Commission for concessions, or ramp up the tension by invoking Article 16 safeguards – or some such.

Then, there seems little hope of resolving the issues on the basis of any clear understanding of the issues. The Telegraph is offering a piece from the "learned" Vernon Bognador – one-time tutor to David Cameron – who asserts that Northern Ireland "remains in effect within the EU customs union".

This, as Pete points out, typifies the ignorance of the chattering classes, where prestige takes precedence over knowledge. And, if the basics aren't even understood, the chances of a quick solution are remote.

It is all very well, therefore, Johnson declaring that he will do "whatever it takes", to protect territorial integrity of UK. On current form, He doesn't have the first idea of what it does take.

Also published on Turbulent Times.