It now looks a certainty that Johnson and Frost will trigger Article 16 of the NI protocol in the next few weeks, after COP26 is out of the way. This has the potential to set off an earthquake in UK-EU relations with the commission apparently talking about suspending or terminating the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. If we go nuclear, they will go thermo-nuclear. The prospects do not look good, but we wait to see what transpires.
Frost and Sefcovic met in Brussels yesterday and afterwards, both released pretty banal statements with no sign of any sort of meeting of minds. Sefcovic's is here:
Johnson seems to have no long term strategy for NI and is simply stumbling on with day-to-day tactics to satisfy one extreme faction or another. The DUP and the ERG want the protocol scrapped while others just want the ECJ's role removed. Business in NI just want to ease frictions and get a bit of stability. They are certain to be disappointed.
If the TCA is terminated we will once again be in no deal territory with the clock set by Brussels this time, ticking down to the end of the 12 month notice period and we are back to the end of 2019.
The government, if it had any sense at all would do well to listen to a presentation given by Brigid Laffan an Irish political scientist and Emeritus Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. This was at Cardiff University and was about Brexit and Ireland but gives a fascinating insight into how the EU worked after the referendum,
You can see the whole thing on Youtube:
The whole presentation is about an hour but two things stood out for me.
Firstly, the Irish were immediately ready for Brexit and published their contingency plans on 24 June 2016. From that point until Theresa May sent her Article 50 letter, the Irish held over 400 meetings at government and diplomatic level to place Ireland and the border issue firmly at the top of the agenda. This is why we have the WA with the NI protocol in it. They ran rings around us.
They went to Washington to get the US onside. They had a communications strategy that went into overdrive from the beginning.
While May and Davis and Johnson floundered and tried to find a common position among the British cabinet, Ireland was getting a consensus among 27 member states. As we know May failed because she had a 'balanced' cabinet who would not compromise. Johnson eventually managed to get a common position by booting out of the cabinet and even the party occasionally, anyone who disagreed.
In Brussels they went quietly about their business and were consistently ahead of us. They knew Britain would try to divide them and were prepared with a detailed mandate from which never wavered. They knew we would try to cherry pick and were prepared for that. They knew we would threaten to leave without a deal and were never intimidated by it.
The EU was always on the front foot, always two or three steps ahead of us. They had control of the process from the first day to the last, They set the agenda and drafted the legal texts.
If anyone believes the EU have not thought the next steps through without detailed plans laid to make life very difficult for us they haven't watched Laffan's video and have no sense of how we were completely outplayed between 2016 and 2021.
Next, if the DUP thinks it can dare the EU to put up a hard border in Ireland, Laffan looked at the referendum results and has a map showing the most pro-EU counties are those along the border. The pro-Brexit vote was largely driven by counties in the north east of Ireland along the Antrim coast.
She says there will not be a border because the communities on either side of it do not want one. This has nothing to do with the EU or the USA.
Frost and Johnson seem to think they can force the EU to accept a loose border with few checks either way, to turn a blind eye to smuggling and tax evasion but this will never happen. The EU may terminate the TCA but this has no effect on the Withdrawal Agreement, They are separate treaties but the EU (or the UK) can take retaliatory action under the TCA if there is none compliance with the WA,
But the WA still has plenty of legal remedies that Brussels can and will pursue. Ending the trade deal will not stop that.
Johnson will have 12 months to stew while the markets go into meltdown and the steady trickle of businesses moving the EU turns into a flood. What will Nissan or BMW do when they learn tariffs will apply in 2023 for example?
The beauty of terminating the TCA is that the EU can afford to sit back and watch with a detailed 1500 page trade deal sitting ready to go, to be reinstated - if the UK behaves itself. They could take it to the wire if need be.
