The boring business of Brexit (again)

By Pete North - November 15, 2021

I had almost forgotten how boring brexitology is. For weeks it goes nowhere followed by a spell of inconsequential squabbles, followed by weeks more tedium. The current row over the Northern Ireland Protocol is much the same thing.

The short of it is that the Tories signed a crap deal, largely ignorant of its implications, but with no real intention of implementing it, in the expectation they could renegotiate it. And they can. The deal contains safeguard measures the UK can invoke if the EU refuses to budge. To be fair to the Tories, they made a reasonable assumption.

For sure it does make us bad faith actors, but then there is no technical or political reason why the deal should not be revisited. It should be recalled that the protocol in its current form is a modified version of the backstop in May’s withdrawal agreement. The backstop, inelegant as it was, was never intended to be activated. The assumption was, in conjunction with the Strasbourg agreement, that it would be replaced either by the future relationship, or by a new agreement if ever it were activated, where in the interim the trade and regulatory parameters of the transition period would hold for Northern Ireland.

In a parallel dimension, May’s withdrawal agreement was ratified, and when Coronavirus hit, the future relationship talks were extended, and by now we’d be looking at the conclusion of a comprehensive agreement that avoided activation of the backstop altogether. That was the intended destination, only it was disrupted by Johnson who misrepresented the deal (with ground cover from the Brexit blob and Tory press) as a vehicle to land him in Number Ten.

From a puritan Brexiteer perspective, that was for the best since the outcome hinged on what May’s ill informed advisers were telling her, which could well have resulted in a mangled customs union and a patchwork of regulatory alignment. Not quite a soft Brexit but not a hard one either, likely with most of the impediments to exercise of sovereignty.

What we got instead was essentially the same mess for Northern Ireland minus the EU-UK Single Customs Territory, and an FTA barely worthy of the name. Since then, the Brexit fundamentalists have agitated for the collapse of this agreement (stoking local politics in NI) in an attempt to get what they wanted from the beginning; no deal and “Singapore on Thames”. They see Article 16 (the safeguard measure) as a means to pull the plug on the whole thing, on the assumption that it will also collapse the TCA. There are hints the EU may do exactly that, but somehow I think it’s a bluff. It would be wholly unnecessary.

The extent to which current talks are just Frost going through the motions is anyone’s guess but it would appear so since his red lines go beyond what the EU can stretch to. This is a cause of some irritation for the EU being that they have made constructive and generous proposals. Frost could take what’s on offer and still call it a win.

Invoking Article 16 is something of a nuclear button that would still result in endless negotiations on much the same issues and not be concluded this side of a general election that the Tories could lose. This kind of sabre rattling was safe play before the dinghy invasion and Johnson’s conversion to the climate cult, but if Frost does pull the trigger, it could, by an accident of numbers, be Starmer’s man doing the talking.

All the same, it remains the case that under May, the EU was willing to replace the backstop with an unspecified alternative ensuring both sides were satisfied. There are sound political reasons why they would not be so forthcoming for Johnson and Frost given their insincerity and track record, but at the end of the day, the protocol still has to be acceptable to the people of Northern Ireland who could just as easily collapse it for their own adjacent reasons.

Both sides have exploited the political sensitives of Irish politics for their own ends, and each side now has to pacify the respective hardliners they’ve enlisted which may not even be possible. Thus, the protocol in its current form cannot possibly continue. The EU has created an ambush for itself and walked right into it, dragging the EU apparatus into something I bet they wish they hadn’t.

Here the EU has to be careful not to set any precedents that the UK would then seek to expand to the TCA and subsequently have to replicate through to its other FTAs, but so long as Frost’ finger is hovering over the red button, and the EU hogtied by its own dogma about maintaining the peace, it will have to go further than its current offer. Though I certainly didn’t cheer on Boris Johnson or support his leadership bid, it’s ultimately his mess to clear up. If Article 16 is tool he has to leverage in order to do it then so be it.

Though Johnson has executed Brexit in possibly the most inept manner possible, we at least approach this now without the baggage of the Article 50 era, where this is less about rigid rules and more about politics, where solitons that didn’t get a fair hearing before may now get a look in. It also benefits from having far fewer prodnose brexperts stirring the pot. A more mutually acceptable solution is possible and it’s incumbent on both sides to find it. But if Johnson imagines antagonising the EU over the protocol will in any way claw back some of his Brexit voting base then he’s sorely mistaken. Northern Ireland was an afterthought leading up to Brexit and it’s an afterthought now.

Even if Johnson secures a win on his arbitrary red lines, his embrace of the climate religion and Net Zero spells no meaningful divergence for the very EU agendas we voted to leave. The vote also implied taking back control of our borders which this government has spectacularly failed to do. He does not score any points for fixing a mess that he himself created. That’s the bare minimum expected of him and he’s even running out of steam to accomplish that. At this rate, next year may be his last year in office before the men in grey suits come knocking.

Whatever the outcome, it’s safe to say that Brexit is far from “done”. As much as the self-inflicted mess of the Northern Ireland Protocol will drag on, we have yet to fully experience the inadequacies of Johnson’s TCA. Checks on incoming goods commence in March, leading to delays and added costs, working to a new system few understand, and as Covid measured begin to lift, we won’t see a recovery of EU-UK trade. Brexit spin doctors have done sterling work in obscuring the picture, but it hinges on believing that ripping us out of the most sophisticated regulated market system ever devised is wholly consequence free. I believe there are consequences and we have not yet seen the business end of Brexit. Johnson might be wise to remove himself before he takes the flack for it.