Of all the difficulties Brexit has thrown up over the last eight years, Northern Ireland has proven to be the most intractable and enduring. There have been plenty of examples that Brexiteers had little idea what the consequences would be if the voters actually took their advice and voted to leave the EU, but none as clear as the Irish border problem. Nigel Farage himself said the people of Northern Ireland have nothing to fear from Britain leaving the EU in March 2016 on a visit to Belfast when he was an MEP and UKIP leader.
Theresa Villiers was NI secretary in April 2016 when she supported Brexit and accused those, including former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who were warning of the problems ahead of “scaremongering” about it.
Ms Villiers thought ‘current trade arrangements [as they were in 2016] between the UK and the Republic would be unhindered following an outvote.’
"I believe that the land border with Ireland can remain as free-flowing after a Brexit vote as it is today," she said although she didn’t explain how. Apparently, Britain could leave the EU, the single market, and the customs union without any changes to the border between Great Britain and Ireland.
A few days after the vote she was still claiming that Northern Ireland couldn’t “maintain any kind of special status within the EU” after quitting the bloc. I think we are all now acutely aware of what happened next.
In the last few days, the deputy leader of The Alliance party in NI, Stephen Farry MP told his party’s conference that Brexit was the "original sin" which the last seven years have been spent dealing with,
David (Lord) Frost took exception and blamed Theresa - not Villiers, but May. He claimed it was the Joint Report of 2017 which the former PM agreed to:
No. The 'original sin' was the foolish agreement to the UK/EU so-called 'Joint Report' by the Theresa May govt in Dec 2017. That said that "in the absence of agreed solutions" Northern Ireland would need to remain part of the EU single market for goods and the customs union.… https://t.co/4COgCtvCz7
— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) March 2, 2024
Mr Farry is of course absolutely right. And even after that, Theresa May's letter triggering Article 50 made clear that concerning Ireland the UK wanted to avoid a "return to a hard border between our two countries." That sin preceded the Joint Report by eight or nine months.
This is what the report said (paragraph 49):
"The United Kingdom remains committed to protecting North-South cooperation and to its guarantee of avoiding a hard border. Any future arrangements must be compatible with these overarching requirements. The United Kingdom's intention is to achieve these objectives through the overall EU-UK relationship. Should this not be possible, the United Kingdom will propose specific solutions to address the unique circumstances of the island of Ireland. In the absence of agreed solutions, the United Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation, the all-island economy, and the protection of the 1998 Agreement."
The report talks of the UK's 'guarantee of avoiding a hard border' which one assumes both Farage and Villiers (and Frost probably) had no objection to at the time and saw that as a legitimate and desirable objective.
In December 2017, as it was becoming clear that the Irish border was THE problem, Farage offered his solution during an interview on LBC:
“I will tell you quite simply; what the UK government should have done is to say we are unconditionally offering a free trade deal to continue with Ireland and we're going to the WTO who will back us up and support that because that's their job is to promote ease of trade.
“We'll go to Brussels and say because of political sensitivity, and after all, it's you in Brussels who keep saying you don't want the Good Friday Agreement compromised, we ask you in Brussels to make an exception for Ireland, whatever you decide to do with the United Kingdom for the rest of the EU.”
This looks to be pretty well what the EU did. They have made an exception for Ireland. Brussels has essentially sub-contracted its border control policy implementation to a third country, something never done before as far as I know,
The problem is that Brexiteers don't like the answer but none of them have come up with a better one than the Windsor Framework for avoiding a land border on the island of Ireland.
It was the failure to even acknowledge there was a huge issue of where any new border would be located and how it would operate. Rather than admit it, Frost and Johnson simply ploughed on regardless as Frost admitted in a speech to the right-wing Policy Exchange in March 2022:
Dangerous Political Trickery as you said. Here is the extract of David Frost’s speech at Policy Exchange where he admitted the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol he and Boris agreed in Oct 2019 were far from “oven ready” but they decided to push them through anyway pic.twitter.com/XkQbRXIikH
— Irish Agreement (@irishagreement) May 1, 2022
Frost and Johnson were well aware that the NI protocol was a serious issue but simply couldn't or wouldn't face up to it and hope someone would resolve the problem for them - which they did, just not in the way they wanted.
Frost is right to say that the arrangements are unsustainable. The solution is either a united Ireland or no Brexit, in other words as it always was.
