According to Boris Johnson, the Northern Ireland protocol bill amounts to a “relatively trivial set of adjustments”. There is, as ever, a gulf separating the truth and the prime minister’s disingenuous assertions. In reality, the proposed legislation published on Monday is wide-ranging, foolishly confrontational with regard to the European Union, and probably illegal under international law.
Doubtless mindful of future votes that she may need in a future Conservative party leadership contest, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, talked the bill up rather than down. It would, she said, “fix” outstanding issues. Crossing one EU red line after another, the proposed changes allow the government to unilaterally renege on key elements of the “oven-ready” treaty that Mr Johnson signed in 2020. The existing regime for checks and tariffs between Britain and Northern Ireland, which were introduced to prevent a hard border re-emerging on the island of Ireland, would be dismantled. Rules on state aid and taxation would be overridden. The European court of justice would be removed from its current role in overseeing the agreement. This is a fantasy wishlist for the Eurosceptic hard right.
Unsurprisingly, in the wake of this provocation, Brussels has restated its intention to take legal action against the United Kingdom, citing a flagrant breach of treaty obligations. Maroš Šefčovič, the European commission vice-president in charge of Brexit negotiations for the EU, stated the obvious on Monday when he observed that aggressive unilateralism of this kind is “damaging to mutual trust and a formula for uncertainty”. Northern Ireland business leaders wrote to the government last week to urge the path of negotiation rather than engineer a confrontation that could result in a trade war. A majority of Northern Ireland assembly members condemned the bill. In the United States, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has warned that a post-Brexit trade deal will be off the table if the government goes down this path.
So why do it, trashing in the process Britain’s reputation as a country that keeps its word? The government high-mindedly claims that it must act to protect the Good Friday agreement by persuading the disgruntled Democratic Unionist party to return to power-sharing in Stormont. This is also disingenuous. It was, of course, the government’s determination to force a hard Brexit that necessitated a border in the Irish Sea in the first place. Since then, claims of Brussels intransigence have been wildly overblown. The European Commission has already agreed to the relaxation of controls on foods and medicines crossing the Irish Sea from Britain. It accepts the need for further flexibility in implementation of the protocol, and it has proposed changes to rules on goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland.
The truth is that this exercise in high-profile Brussels-bashing has been orchestrated to appease Eurosceptic hardliners in the Conservative party, reviving the Brexit dividing lines that once served Mr Johnson so well. Severely weakened after last week’s no-confidence vote, and facing two imminent byelections that could trigger further rebellions, Mr Johnson hopes that some of the old tunes can soothe and mollify his critics. The bill was cooked up in consultation with the Brexit theologians of the European Research Group of Conservative MPs. The deeply depressing return of the ERG to a centre-stage role is one more sign of how beleaguered and desperate this prime minister has become.
