The Northern Ireland protocol continues to be a tightrope for the UK government. The new DUP leader, Edwin Poots, appeared on the Marr show yesterday and again demanded the protocol be "ditched." He himself is leading a bitterly divided party. A few days ago, the former leader, Arlene Foster and some other senior members walked out as Poots was formally confirmed and before he gave his acceptance speech. Jeffrey Donaldson, the losing candidate in the leadership contest now complains of his team being intimidated by members of his own party. I don't thing Johnson or Frost will be too concerned about the DUP's internal problems (although they should be) but they face pressure from their own side, too.
According to the Irish Times, Poots accused the EU of using Northern Ireland as a "plaything" and seemed to ignore or forget his own party's role in the whole Brexit debacle. More on this below.
He at one point yesterday talked about a "Swiss deal" to reduce the number of checks but this has already been ruled out by Frost and Johnson. Meanwhile Maros Sefcovic, also on Marr, suggested the same sort of thing:
A veterinary agreement can be done in a few weeks if the EU and UK can move from ideology into pragmatism and real politics, says European Commission’s Maroš Šefčovič#Marr https://t.co/9KJ3IfcWBM pic.twitter.com/H8udTFk4t6
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) May 30, 2021
The clip and the tweet are interesting because the BBC chose to say "if the EU and UK" can move from ideology to pragmatism. Sefcovic doesn't actually say that he uses "we" by which I think he means the UK. The EU doesn't have an ideology on the matter, it only has a signed agreement with the UK which it expects to be implemented.
Last week the EU Vice President said all the solutions were coming from the EU and not the UK:
“To be quite honest all these solutions are coming from our side... from the UK side we still do not have the basic answers”.@MarosSefcovic diplomatically echoing the huge frustration in Bxl & EU capitals at Govt's foot dragging over the Protocolhttps://t.co/10m6PDKww1— Mujtaba Rahman (@Mij_Europe) May 29, 2021
I confess this doesn't surprise me. Frost never had any solutions, only red lines. The Withdrawal Agreement was built on red lines.
For a good summary of where we are currently on the NIP, the ever reliable Tony Connelly has an article at RTE. He says there is "broad progress" in negotiations between European Commission and UK officials at technical level with more than 25 areas of contention being identified, including food, medicines, the movement of pets, plants, VAT on second hand cars, and imports on steel.
But on the food and SPS questions the two sides are thought to remain far apart when it comes to the movement of large, mixed consignments of food from GB depots to supermarkets and retailers in Northern Ireland.
On this point I noted the other day, The Telegraph reporting that Tesco intend to shuffle off the problem of border checks and controls to their suppliers. But as a spokesman from the British Meat Processors Association, which represents fresh meat suppliers, said "That added cost has to be paid for by somebody. Inevitably it means it's being pushed onto suppliers, and all they can do is look at where they recover that cost." It doesn't solve the problem that on average the cost of delivering goods to the European Union had doubled since Brexit, no matter who pays. It might be the supplier initially but in the end it will be the customer.
But back to the DUP. In late February 2016, as the referendum campaign was about to get under way, they held a meeting to decide, among other things, which side they were going to support. Although the meeting lasted hours and discussed a lot of other issues, the referendum decision was made in minutes with barely any thought or discussion:
In 2019 Jim Wells, then without the party whip, admitted this to Stephen Nolan. The hours long meeting decided the referendum position in minutes and didn't weigh up the consequences. Economic issues weren't considered. He revealed a shockingly reckless lack of scrutiny.— 😷 alt - DUP (@dup_online) April 7, 2021
The party member Jim Wells, revealed there was no impact assessment presented on how a leave win would affect Northern Ireland and there were no voices raised in support of remain, with the matter being decided in minutes. He is quoted:
"Once we established the principle of leaving Europe [in a few minutes remember] the modalities would work out later,,, we were just concentrating on the getting out from under the yoke of the EU."
What have seen since June 2016 are the disastrous "modalities" he talked about.
He acknowledges the DUP have always been a eurosceptic party and that it was "an easy decision" to make. But the Twitter thread points to the DUP's 2015 election manifesto which sets out the clear advantages that EU membership brings and that they wanted it to continue, extolling the benefits of the single market and freedom of movement.
The Brexit they voted for in 2016 wasn't the one Theresa May or the ERG wanted, or the one Johnson and Frost negotiated. In fact, it isn't clear to me what it was that they did want beyond the borderless advantage of EU membership without actual membership. It was always going to be impossible.
What they have now finished up with is a divided party, a risk of a return to violence, a slump in the polls meaning the loss of the first minister post at next year's elections and a shift towards Irish unification. This is not even to mention the economic damage.
Johnson's role in February 2016 was to reassure them that the Irish border would remain "absolutely unchanged," what this meant was an Irish sea border but they couldn't see it. Now they can. And that's the problem.
