Thursday, 12 May 2022

The NIP is hotting up once again

You can tell Johnson is in big trouble when the Northern Ireland Protocol rises up the political agenda again. Liz Truss has been threatening to tear up the protocol and although the promised legislation didn't appear in the Queen's speech, The Times now reports that Attorney General, Suella Braverman, has given it the legal green light after apparently receiving legal advice. No doubt plenty of other lawyers will disagree and opposition parties will also no doubt ask to see the advice the AG received.

The NIP issue is one of Johnson's own making as we know. He is at the very epicentre of what may turn out to be the biggest political and constitutional disaster of Brexit so far.

The DUP won’t go into a power sharing executive with the NIP in place and you can be assured that Sinn Fein won’t without it. The DUP want the protocol ditched completely. The UK government in 2019 signed a deal which was bound to upset one side of the divide in Northern Ireland or the other and so it has proved.

It’s back to the Northern Ireland trilemma, this time writ larger and in ever sharper focus..

The Brexiteers want Brexit, and a hard Brexit at that, which means a border somewhere. It can’t be on the land because of the GFA, now it can’t be in the Irish Sea because the DUP won’t enter power sharing.  Something will have to give but it isn't the protocol.

But the EU’s Vice President, Maros Sefcovic says in a prepared statement:

"The Protocol, as a cornerstone of the Withdrawal Agreement, is an international agreement. Its renegotiation is not an option. The European Union is united in this position."

Let me say, I don't think the UK government will do anything like triggering Article 16 or dumping the protocol, not least because we couldn't afford to upset the EU and the US at the same time.  Two US congressman have already expressed 'alarm' at what the government is said to be planning in a stiff letter to Truss the foreign secretary.

So there will be a lot of steam released but the NIP will never be suspended or ditched.

However, I want to draw attention to two prime examples of the stupidity and ignorance of Brexiteers on this subject. First up Daniel (now Lord!) Hannan.

Writing in The Washington Examiner, Hannan, claims the NIP was never intended to be a permanent solution:

“Third, the protocol was intended to be temporary. The EU insisted on it as an insurance policy in case there was no trade deal with the U.K. But such a trade deal has now been signed — the most comprehensive between the EU and any nonapplicant state.”

As far as I remember, Theresa May’s backstop was explicitly to be temporary, pending the trade talks and the invention of a lot of clever border technology sometime in the future, while Johnson’s deal expressly removed all references to it being temporary. The Withdrawal Agreement and the NIP were always intended to be an “all weather solution” - or the 'insurance policy' as Hannan calls it. He is flat wrong.

Either he is being totally disingenuous to his American audience or he simply doesn't get it - after six years.

Next, Conor Burns has been on TV with a great wad of paperwork which he says businesses in GB are having to deal with to get goods into NI. Here he is:

He says this is what companies are complaining about - despite all the checks not actually being implemented so far. I am sure there is some truth in what he says but remember, this is what Johnson signed up to.

At more or less the same time, Lord Frost, the man most responsible for the mess below the PM. tweeted this: 

Frost acknowledges the border needs to go somewhere and he implies - at least - that it can go on the 210 mile land border provided the checks don't actually take place on the border itself.

I am not sure the DUP or the companies complaining about paperwork are worried about where the checks take place, they would still be left filling in the reams of paperwork that Conor Burns was waving on television yesterday.

Brexiteers themselves can't actually agree what the problem is let alone define a solution.  Is it the amount of paperwork or is it the location of the border controls?  Putting them inland away from the border doesn't really do a lot in my opinion other that symbolically.

But back to Braverman. The attorney-general has advised that legislation to override the Northern Ireland protocol would be legal because the EU’s implementation of it is “disproportionate and unreasonable”.  She also doesn't seem to have any difficulty with the place where checks are carried out.

Braverman says that the EU is undermining the GFA by creating a trade barrier in the Irish Sea and fuelling civil unrest and argues that the agreement (the GFA) has “primordial significance” and is more important than the protocol. 

“There’s mountains of evidence that there’s a trade barrier down the middle of our country,” said a government source. “Suella has argued that trade is being diverted.”

There is a trade barrier down the Irish sea but the government can hardly be surprised since this has been obvious to almost everybody below the PM since October 2019.

Theresa May's former chief of staff tweeted:

Don’t forget the WA and the NIP were not only freely negotiated by Johnson, hailed by him as an excellent ‘oven ready’ deal, it was approved by the British people in a general election where it was the Tory party's principal policy.  All 635 Tory candidates approved it.  Most MPs voted for it in parliament. Now a majority of MLAs at the recent Stormont elections support it.

I don't see how all this can be forgotten just because a minority party in Northern Ireland who never supported the GFA in any case, refuse to join the power sharing executive.

Finally, former justice minister David Gauke has a nice article in Conservative Home setting out 10 reasons why the government needs to pull back. Johnson would do well to read it.

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