Stop me if you’ve heard this before. The debate on the Northern Ireland Protocol has come to an end. The British government is reportedly preparing legislation on the unilateral severance of the agreement with the EU.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Lord Frost first explicitly threatened to suspend parts of the UK-EU deal last October, after months of saber rattling.
In December, Liz Truss used his first call with European Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič to emphasize that the UK was prepared to trigger Article 16, which would effectively trigger the deal. In January, he made the first direct threat from him. in march she he allegedly told officials to prepare to activate the Article that week. And in April anonymous sources told reporters that the government was preparing to activate the Article after the Northern Ireland election.
But even this doesn’t tell the whole story, because before Article 16, there was a no-deal Brexit. During those long and terrible years of the Brexit debate, this too was threatened on a regular basis. Each time, large teams of public officials went to work figuring out how to handle it. In fact, it was one of the main reasons why the country was not prepared to respond to the covid pandemic. And each time, it came to nothing.
The threat of breaching the Protocol is to the post-Brexit world what no deal was to Brexit. It is a constant threat that can be carried out at any time. Will they ever? Nobody really knows. Maybe even they don’t know. Maybe this will actually happen next week. Or maybe it’s just like all the other false alarms.
What we do know for sure is that it is often an empty threat. The Government has been making belligerent threats on Article 16 for more than half a year and yet there was no legislation to implement it in the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday. Instead, we were told that legislation was being prepared in addition to it. That does not suggest a well thought out plan. It suggests that, at least some of the time, this administration is threatening to take serious action without intending to do so.
We also know one other thing for certain: every time the government makes this threat, it undermines the UK’s global credibility.
This was once a country that was taken seriously. He understood the terms of the international treaties he negotiated and abided by them once he signed them. He was an adult actor on the world stage.
It is no longer possible to reach that conclusion. In October 2019, Boris Johnson wrote to then Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to propose what would become the endorsement. The explanatory notes published by the British government were clear about what this would entail. “Agri-food products entering Northern Ireland from Britain…would be subject to identity and documentation checks and physical examination by UK authorities as required by relevant EU rules,” they said.
These provisions are now a source of outrage to the same government that proposed them. That suggests one of two things: either they didn’t realize what they were agreeing to, in which case they’re idiots, or they realized it and intended to take it back later, in which case they’re liars. Either way, it leaves the UK’s international standing in the gutter.
Europe is rightly outraged to see a partner it negotiated with say it will unilaterally revoke the deal it agreed to. Washington is said to be “shocked” by the threats.
Johnson likes to stress how critical it is to Vladimir Putin’s alliance against barbarism in Ukraine. And yet he is currently proposing that the UK enter into a bitter emotional dispute with the US and the EU by breaking their legal commitments. It could not do Putin’s job for him more effectively: it cuts off the Western alliance and legitimizes its attack on international law.
Truss argues that the Northern Ireland elections provide the justification for this course of action, using as justification the fact that the DUP refuses to support the creation of a government unless there is action on the Protocol. But they are not the biggest party. In fact, the vast majority of the seats won in the Assembly last week went to the parties that want the Protocol to work: Sinn Fein, the Alliance and the SDLP.
Neither Truss nor Johnson seem to give a damn about the international implications of their actions or the results of the Northern Ireland election. His only concern is electoral. Government sources have told journalists that the activation of Article 16 provides a clear dividing line with Keir Starmer, helping them open up some of those old Brexit scars and draw him away from Red Wall voters.
The price, in the end, is much greater than our international reputation or our internal politics. It is the establishment of a permanent state of Schrödinger emergency. It is the creation of a political culture in which no one can be sure what is real and what is not, because the threat of constitutional crisis remains permanently bubbling, ready to explode at any moment. It is an administration that maintains a post-truth Kremlin stance: we don’t know what they believe, we don’t know what they plan to do, we don’t know if they mean what they say, and we don’t even know if they understand the implications of what they are proposing.
The idea of governance as a sober and responsible affair, in which politicians are clear with voters about what they are trying to achieve and how they plan to achieve it, has faded. Instead, we are trapped in the world of endemic uncertainty. Always on the brink of calamity, never sure if any of this is real.
What is being threatened here is not just our relationship with our allies. It is more fundamental than that. It is our basic ability to form meaningful thoughts about the direction of politics. It is the basic honesty required to maintain trust in government.
Reference-inews.co.uk