There is no good reason for the UK to sabotage relations with its European neighbours, but doing it to score ideological points with a small faction of the prime minister’s supporters is exceptionally poor judgment. Yet that is what Boris Johnson intends to do with legislation, now said to be due for publication next week, to override the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit deal he signed in 2019.
The ostensible trigger is the collapse of power-sharing at Stormont, caused by the Democratic Unionist party’s refusal to form an administration with Sinn Féin. The DUP objects to the basis of the protocol – the requirement for customs checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea – and wants it rewritten. The EU offers modifications in the way that the treaty is implemented, saying checks are necessary to prevent Northern Ireland becoming an unregulated backdoor into the single market.
Mr Johnson accepted the Brussels view when he did the deal, then changed his tune. He is now equivocating between different degrees of diplomatic vandalism. Tory hardliners, represented in cabinet by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, envisage a law that would strike the protocol down. A less extreme variant would create an override mechanism, but keep it in reserve, pending the outcome of negotiations in Brussels. The DUP prefers the more drastic option, fearing that powers in reserve would stay unused. Either version would be an affront to international law and a stain on the UK’s credentials as a practitioner of responsible statecraft. Unsurprisingly, the EU is becoming less willing to compromise.
The practical problems caused by Irish Sea customs checks are overstated. Businesses are adapting. Data published by the Office for National Statistics last week shows that Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK outside London to enjoy positive growth in the first quarter of this year. That reflects a privileged position in the single market.
In other words, the protocol is doing more economic good than harm. It is politically toxic because Mr Johnson’s duplicitous ways have made it so. A responsible prime minister would have defended the treaty to which he put his name instead of disowning it, managing unionist disappointment with realistic concessions instead of stoking sectarian anger. The Tory ultras demanding the most radical confrontation with Brussels are animated by points of Brexit theology that are tangential to the customs issue and not even a priority concern for the DUP.
Unilateral abandonment of a treaty would be reckless at the best of times. The international context makes it reprehensible. European democracies are in a moral confrontation with Russia, provoked by Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Mr Johnson has been stalwart in his support for Kyiv, and on that basis claims for himself status as a champion of the western alliance. The boast is undermined by his sabotage of continental solidarity closer to home. Micheál Martin, the Irish taoiseach, was right this week to warn his British counterpart against actions that show “disregard for essential principles of laws, which are the foundation of international relations”.
No good can come of re-enacting old Brexit battles at home or abroad. The only purpose is conflict for its own sake as a device to animate a fanatically partisan Eurosceptic spirit that Mr Johnson craves because his support elsewhere has fallen away. In so doing, the prime minister is not only prolonging his own disgrace but using it to contaminate Britain’s international reputation.
