Brexit is full of baffling contradictions. Control of our borders so important that they are left wide open during a pandemic, and goods from the EU are still pouring in unchecked. Trade with the EU next door isn't important while getting a trade deal with faraway India is so vital we delay stopping flights from that country so long that people are likely to die from the new Covid-19 variant. Leaving the EU's bloc is vital to regain our sovereignty but Scotland shouldn't leave the United Kingdom, and so on. You get what I mean.
However. James Crisp, Europe editor of the The Telegraph has an article which is headlined Treasury prepares for a bonfire of EU red tape has come up with another one. I don't know if this is correct or not but I doubt we are going to see a bonfire, whatever happens - and reading well down into the article it says "the Treasury remains of the view that there should not be divergence for its own sake."
Treasury prepares for bonfire of EU red tape https://t.co/0ZGVX0TlWB
— Allister Heath (@AllisterHeath) May 15, 2021
The bizarre claim in the headline is justified on the grounds of the EU refusing to grant something called equivalence to the UK's financial sector. I don't believe the EU have refused although they are taking their time because they think we plan to diverge from EU rules - in which case there wouldn't be equivalence. And who can blame them when the uncertainty created is benefitting the EU by shifting yet more jobs to Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The article says:
"The European Commission has demanded details of Britain’s plans to diverge from EU rules before it considers granting access through a system called equivalence, which can be unilaterally withdrawn with as little as 30 days notice in some cases."
The EU position does not seem that unreasonable to me. The strange argument is that because the EU haven't granted equivalence yet we should have a bonfire of EU regulations and thus ensure we never get equivalence. See what I mean? It makes no sense. In fact it sounds quite childish.
Next, on the ongoing NI saga, Andrew Levi comments on the claims that a close ally of the PM is suggesting the NI protocol is 'dead in the water' with the claim that the unelected Lord Frost has set a deadline (they love deadlines don't they?) of July 12 to get an agreement with Brussels to relax much of the NI protocol.
We don’t know who the “senior ally” of @BorisJohnson quoted by @Telegraph is. We can guess. @DavidGHFrost well knows that if the Northern Ireland Protocol is “dead in the water”, so is the “oven-ready” Brexit. Either that or the Good Friday Agreement. /1.https://t.co/Y9xMwQXFLi
— Andrew Levi (@AndrewPRLevi) May 15, 2021
But as Levi points out in his Twitter thread , the 'senior ally' claims that the NI protocol contravenes the Good Friday Agreement 'in many ways' simply exposes another contradiction. If the government is so keen to protect the GFA, it means they are wholly committed to having no land border on the island.
In which case we are back to the Irish trilemma.
Levi says the government is playing fast and loose with the GFA which he suggests is not just deeply irresponsible it won't work. Even when Donald Trump was still in the White House it would not have worked. He says "you can pretend putting a customs & regulatory border across Ireland is GFA-compatible. An irresistible force is going to make clear to you, that’s not on."
In fact, to be strictly correct two irresistible forces - the USA and the EU.
So, the conclusion must be that if there can be no Irish land border and the NI protocol is ditched Levi says the PM has to recognise there’s no way out of the corner into which he’s backed himself, except to remain in the SM and the CU:
"He can’t have his Brexit. He can have a different one. A customs union & single market one. An utterly pointless one, to be sure. The culmination of David Cameron’s carelessly catastrophic European odyssey. A Brexit which will almost certainly detonate his political career."
Personally, I think the NI Brexit farce has quite a bit longer to run while Frost, Gove and Johnson flail around to try and make the protocol work by both having/not having a border in the Irish sea. The delusion is not killed that easily.
What this means in the short term is finding some extremely finely balanced middle ground, a carefully calibrated position that satisfies the DUP, traders and citizens in the province as well as Brussels, Dublin, London and the USA - and probably some others I haven't thought of. Is that even possible? I am not convinced it is.
In my own personal and very limited experience deals that try to find a balance between a lot of competing interests are always shaky affairs and prone to breakdown at any time, so even if an agreement is reached (as it was in October 2019) it is unlikely to last. There will need to be a lot of trade offs and always one or more parties to the deal will think they have traded off more than the others.
Nick McPherson, formerly the most senior Treasury official tweeted about Lord Frost:
I have the highest regard for Lord Frost from his time at the Scotch Whisky Association. But as the man who negotiated the "triumph" of the N Ire protocol, I'm puzzled why he's so against it. Indulging the loopy wing of the DUP at the expense of moderate opinion never ends well. https://t.co/riqRxFITEG
— Nick Macpherson (@nickmacpherson2) May 16, 2021
I have always thought that Northern Ireland is the key to Brexit and the longer this goes on the more convinced I am that it will eventually founder on the treacherous rocks of Antrim.
