Saturday 10 July 2021

Frost told some home truths in Belfast

If Lord Frost wasn’t previously aware of the Pandora’s box he has opened up in Northern Ireland (and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t) that was brutally changed yesterday when he appeared before an executive committee at Stormont. MLA member Martina Anderson posted on Twitter a short video of her grilling the architect of the Withdrawal Agreement about his role in the contentious protocol.

She pulled no punches. "You were Britain's chief negotiator for Brexit, your eyes were wide open and your finger prints is [sic] on every page of the protocol and you know that people here in the north rejected Brexit. And you also know that the majority of parties in this assembly that represent the majority of people out there, on nine separate debates, [made it clear] that they rejected Brexit but support the protocol."

She told Frost that the next agreement that he implements in full will be his first and went on:

"I would ask you not to use this place [Stormont] in any agreement or exchange that you are having with the EU because people here do not trust you, they do not believe you and people here want to see the protocol implemented in full."

It was a crushing humiliation but we don't see what his reaction to it was. No doubt he will dismiss it all as coming from a remainer and a former MEP but he must surely take away something from it.

Frost and Johnson forced the whole thing through without considering or even understanding what the protocol meant for the province and now they are utterly stuck like one of those juggernauts in a narrow Devon lane. They can’t go forward because the unionists don’t like it and can’t go back because the nationalists won’t allow it.

All the old divisions have been opened up. The uneasy peace which broke out when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 (which the DUP never accepted) has been shaken and perhaps broken.

Ms Anderson made the point forcefully that half the population want to see the protocol implemented. And why shouldn’t they? It is bringing about closer trade ties between north and south and makes Irish unification more likely. Looked at through that prism, it’s hard to figure out why the DUP ever supported Brexit in the first place.

I think the experience yesterday may have brought home to Frost just what a dangerous moment this is. He is threatening to repudiate the protocol (all options remain on the table he says repeatedly) in response to pressure from unionists but will now have seen that that is not an option.

The nationalists and republicans won’t allow him to do that and no doubt Dublin and the EU will have already realised it. The horrible truth is that the protocol is a fact of life now, it is in a binding international treaty and half the population in NI are fully behind it. The other half are fully opposed to it.

For Johnson - or more likely his successors because he will simply wash his hands of it and blame the EU - the problem is that both sides have hard liners who are more than happy to return to violence. The province has always been a powder keg and the NIP is simply the latest naked flame hovering over it

Frost stupidly complains the EU are insisting in implementing the east west border as if it’s an external border of the European Union - which is exactly what he agreed to do! What would Priti Patel say if France were controlling the border at Calais and allowing a stream of migrants through every day? We don’t even have to imagine because she is already complaining that the French are not doing enough to prevent asylum seekers crossing the Channel.

It is becoming very noticeable that nobody now wants to take credit for the ‘great’ oven-ready deal. Frost wanted to bask in the glory of getting an agreement but not for the parts that Brexiteers, especially unionists in NI, are unhappy with. He blamed Mrs May and her team for the "infelicities" in the protocol - the one he negotiated under a self-imposed time limit.

The halfwit Frost told DUP member Christopher Stalford: "We intend to implement what we signed up to but it's the fact of implementation that's causing the problem.

"I would say that it was the inheritance that we inherited from the previous government and from the previous negotiating team that has been a significant part of the difficulty, and the reason the protocol is shaped as it is, is because we had a particular inheritance from the previous team who could not get their deal, rightly in my view, through parliament.

"Unfortunately we were not able to go back to scratch and do things in a different way and I think the previous team are to a very large degree responsible for some of the infelicities in this protocol and the Withdrawal Agreement that we might be better without but unfortunately we are where we are."

Nothing to do with him or Johnson or Cummings then?

Let's be clear, politicians on both sides of the Irish sea are going to be wrestling with the mess for which he is personally responsible for years, even decades.
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