A peer and Northern Ireland expert has urged unionists to respond to the substance of Rishi Sunak’s revised Brexit deal alone, rather than the “communal rhetoric” that has been whipped up by others.
Paul Bew told MPs on Wednesday it was “important” that people recognised the tricky political task facing the Democratic Unionist party leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, who must balance the views of the party and its base when making a decision on whether to support the Windsor framework.
“There is a problem of political management here for the DUP,” the crossbench peer told the Northern Ireland affairs committee. “They are confronted with a mood of their community which has been to some degree created by others.”
The prime minister unveiled the deal on Monday, hailing it as a “decisive breakthrough”.
Lord Bew, who has written several books on Irish history and was once an adviser to the unionist politician David Trimble, said he worried that “people will not decide enough on the basis of the content of the deal in front of them … they will decide it on the basis of communal balance, communal rhetoric, things that have been said, which poked them in the eye”.
He urged people to give Donaldson the space to arrive at his conclusion, which may take weeks. “What I am saying is to respect the task of political leadership, which is not an easy one for the DUP at the present time because there is a sourness in this community, which is outside the actual issues that are dealt with in the Windsor framework,” he added.
He was speaking after Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost was critical of Sunak’s Northern Ireland protocol deal, saying it would “help” but would not remove EU law from Northern Ireland.
Frost also hit out at some Conservative party members who, he said, “without much evident scrutiny or reflection have come out in support” of the new pact. “Most of our political class is choosing not to look too closely at any of this because they are tired of the whole problem,” he said.
But in his first public verdict on the Windsor framework, unveiled by the prime minister and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in Windsor on Monday, he conceded: “This doesn’t mean the deal shouldn’t go ahead.”
On Monday, Sunak declared the deal “removes any sense of a border in the Irish Sea”. In a column in the Daily Telegraph, Lord Frost argues that the government is “guilty of some overclaiming” when it says there is “now no border in the Irish Sea”, and that he does not think the claim by the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, that the deal “ends all trade barriers” is right.
He says the EU’s version of the deal describes it as an arrangement involving a “reduction, although not a full eradication, of customs requirements” for goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. He also says goods, bar foods, drinks and drugs must meet EU standards.
He says the 1,700 EU laws the government claims are being disapplied by the deal are being removed through an EU law that, he suggests, “the EU can change or suspend unilaterally if it wishes”.
The Stormont brake, a mechanism to allow Northern Ireland assembly members to block new EU laws, is also questioned by Frost, who says the power to use it will ultimately lie with the government given the conditions that must be met.
His criticism is tempered by a grudging acceptance that the deal looks like it is “going to happen”. “At one level, so it should. The negotiating team has worked hard to get a deal making the protocol easier to operate, including changes to the protocol text, which the EU had hitherto refused,” he writes.
