A former British civil servant and EU negotiator, Sydney Nash, tweets occasionally and always very wise stuff. He commented the other day on the NI protocol which continues to be the single greatest source of friction and acrimony between London and Brussels and is probably going to explode into a full blown crisis this autumn, if not before. Nash makes some important points.
His Twitter thread is here:
The publication of the government’s command paper, “Northern Ireland Protocol: The way forward”, confirms, if we are to believe what it says, that this government’s approach to Northern Ireland is defined by negligence.
— Sydney Nash (@NashSGC) July 23, 2021
Nash rejects out of hand the government’s claim that they were ‘forced’ into signing the deal and are therefore justified in calling for a renegotiation. He says they can’t blame the problem on Mrs May because they called for, and got, the EU to renegotiate her deal and therefore the new one is unequivocally their own. He characterises their approach as negligence.
The government. he says, should "not bemoan the current state of affairs when it chose to press ahead, against all better advice, with an unsustainable timeline for implementation in the face of a global pandemic."
Under Michael Gove, although Nash doesn’t name him - the government kept insisting they had made plans to ensure the NI protocol would be fully implemented in time for the end of the transition period last year. I posted a lot at the end of 2020 about people, serious people in positions of authority, saying the preparations were inadequate and that we would not be ready in time.
In December, Gove agreed a short three month extension but had to unilaterally extend that in March and we are still not implementing it in full and highly unlikely to be ready in September! Stunning.
Also rejected is the idea that they didn’t know what the consequences of the protocol were.
"This government knows that it is spinning a yarn. It is trying to create the impression that the deal we now have is not its deal, but another government’s deal that was forced upon it, and that it is, therefore, only reasonable for this government to renegotiate that deal.
"Forget the fact this government already renegotiated the last government’s deal, resulting in the deal that we have today. This government’s deal."
But recognising we are where we are, he asks why the government is now threatening to ditch the protocol and what is behind the present strategy.
He makes the point that Brussels is unlikely to renegotiate the deal, but if it did it would only be if they trusted Frost and Johnson. Clearly, they do not and for that the blame can only be placed on Frost himself. He has gone out of his way to be awkward and abrasive and to pick petty fights as Nash says. None of which is conducive to building trust.
Frost seems to revel in throwing his weight about, taking or threatening unilateral action and forcing a new crisis every few weeks.
But more than that, even if circumstances came about which persuaded the EU to look again at the protocol, any renegotiation requires compromise and that means the UK making concessions on sovereignty, but Frost has already indicated that he thinks we have already conceded too much and wants to claw some back!
"This government wants to take more sovereignty back. It does not want to subject itself to EU rules. It wants to make the rules, all the rules. It wants control, and the existence of the Protocol is evidence that it does not have control, that Brexit is still not done."
Frost as we know, seems to think sovereignty is so important, that it overrides everything else, including food shortages, unrest and potentially a return to the thirty years of troubles which only ended when the GFA was signed in 1998.
What the UK is demanding is that 27 sovereign nations agree to compromise their sovereignty, open the risk of umpteen other international treaties having to be renegotiated because the EU have offered the UK an equivalence deal on food standards that nobody else has. This to avoid Britain following food safety rules that we helped to develop and which we have followed for decades. It makes no sense and does not recognise just how difficult it would be for Brussels to persuade member states to accept, even if they wanted to.
So, what will happen? Nash thinks the government knows that a "wholesale renegotiation of the Protocol is not going to happen, and it knows that even if a renegotiation were to take place, it would not make the concessions necessary for that renegotiation to succeed."
It is all a charade to prepare for 2024 when an election is coming and the protocol gets voted on in NI.
The government, says Nash, has had "so much success at the ballot box when it plays the Brexit card, [it] may be tempted to do the same again at the next general election. Ideally, Johnson’s Conservatives will want to present themselves as defending Britain against the nefarious EU, while Labour will be presented as a group of unreformed remainers.
"This government could, of course, concoct something for this purpose, but an argument over the Protocol would fit the bill perfectly."
A Lords committee has urged both sides to compromise and the American administration has told Britain to stick to the structures already in place. The EU have suspended legal action (not halted note) almost certainly to remove one possible excuse for Frost to use to justify triggering Article 16.
The Command Paper is seen by many as fundamentally unserious and simply intended for domestic consumption in trying to show we are being ‘reasonable’ in resisting the ‘bullying’ of Brussels. This is the sort of thing Hitler used to justify invading Czechoslovakia and Poland or Putin in annexing Crimea. It’s a manufactured excuse for unilaterally scrapping the protocol.
There are plenty of commentators who believe this was always the plan. If so, they are playing a very dangerous game. Is Brexit worth reigniting violence in Ireland or splitting Scotland from the rUK?
The problem is that this government thinks it is.
