Vaccinegate: a disaster on top of a disaster
By Pete North - January 29, 2021
It would appear the the EU has not done a stellar job of its vaccine procurement initiative, at face value there is almost certainly an argument for the agility of the nation state. If I’ve read the situation right the EU has attempted to co-opt a UK quota of vaccines by way of a vaguely worded contract.
Brexiteers are having a field day with this, being that it seems largely unambiguous. One tweeter even dares to venture that “the European Commission has just killed off Rejoin for at least a generation”. Ben Habib, formerly of the Brexit Party, has it that “For years Brexiteers have warned that the EU is a protectionist racket with malign intent to others. If there was any doubt, there can be none now”.
Spicing it up even further, the Commission has invoked Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol on “averting serious societal difficulties” as regards vaccines, amounting to an export ban, specifically, to the UK – and if I’ve read the situation correctly that means UK orders due in from German manufacturers are cut off.
There are two ways to view this. Either the EU is showing its true colours, or it is merely exercising its own leverage for the benefit of EU citizens. Either way, this is a highly specific and acrimonious spat exclusively between the UK and EU – not even a month after the transition ended.
One notes, as an aside, that Article 16 is essentially a copy paste of Article 112 EEA. Article 112 EEA was used by Liechtenstein to limit free movement of persons. We were told that wouldn’t fly by naysayers of the Brexpert fraternity, but it seems a benchmark has been set for such invocations.
Though Brexiteers are taking all this as a vindication, particularly as the big drop cliff edge didn’t quite happen, it’s a little premature for poultry auditing. We are instead experiencing a slow puncture and sooner or later we’re going to experience difficulties with imports as well as exports, ramping up price if not limiting availability and this could extend to medicines purely as a consequence of leaving the single market.
Instead of a functioning partnership, decisions over the last four years on the part of the Tories have taken us into a trade war with our nearest and most important market, in which the EU is perfectly able to lean on us and make us sweat. Meanwhile in the background we have the DUP briefing against the Protocol and we shall no doubt see the ERG leaning on Johnson to withdraw from the Withdrawal Agreement.
This is now not outside the realms of possibility. The Protocol was already causing problems but with safeguard measures now being used in a tit-for-tat political row, by no means in the spirit they were devised, this might very well be the thing that brings it all crashing down. It’s a shot in the arm for Johnson’s popularity, and with his majority he could pull the plug on it with ease. We still see Patrick Minford on the television telling us how the border should be “seamless” under WTO rules. The ERG is still chipping at the foundations.
As I’ve alluded to previously, the battle to kill the WTO option is not yet over. Worse still, at this point it takes on a certain appeal being that the option is not compared with EU membership or the Norway option, rather it is compared with the dog’s dinner that is the WA and the TCA.
The WA places a customs border through our own territory which is a national humiliation (albeit self-inflicted) while the TCA does not appear to do our exports any favours at all. As the Brexit Party have discovered in recent weeks, a more generous quota and no tariffs isn’t much use if you can’t get goods into the EU. They were expecting Brexit to be a shot in the arm for UK fish markets. Instead it’s killing them off.
Being that we are, thanks to the the misapprehensions of Frost and Johnson, experiencing many of the no-deal consequences anyway, and with the TCA failing to live up to its promise as a cooperative instrument while UK-EU relations fall apart, one could argue a case for a do-over (not that it would produce any better results).
In any case, this is precisely what we didn’t want. Brexiteers may be gloating but the deterioration of relations is as much to do with the EU having been buggered about at every single stage of the exit process, not least with the Internal Market Bill and the refusal to recognise EU ambassadors. We have problems enough with Covid and Brexit, and the end of the transition should have marked a new leaf whereby we began building a relationship of another kind. This, however, is a disaster on top of a disaster – and one we simply cannot afford to make worse.