The Brexit deal has shown how truly awful Rishi Sunak is at politics
Academics like me tend to think in terms of constants and variables. Variables, well, vary. Constants do not. It’s worth being clear about this given the confusion surrounding the ongoing saga around the Northern Ireland Protocol. Observers – and potentially the Prime Minister himself – have got their constants and variables muddled up. Hence (though I’d be delighted to be proven wrong) we’ve reached another impasse. Or, rather, arrived at precisely the same impasse, again.
Let’s start with the one massive constant here. The Protocol itself has not been rewritten or revised, let along scrapped. The EU has steadfastly refused to countenance revisiting it. Therefore, the text remains as it was when Boris Johnsons negotiated and signed it. The issues it raised at the time are still with us today.
And those issues were as clear then as they are now, not least in the Impact Assessment of the Government’s European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill of 2019. It’s all in there: the need for goods arriving in Northern Ireland from Great Britain to undergo regulatory checks; for Border Inspection Posts to check agri-food goods; for import declarations and export summary declarations. And so on and so forth.
So, the Protocol is still in place. What appears to have changed (and I’m discussing an arrangement that remains a closely guarded secret here) is how that document will be implemented. Both the UK and EU appeared to have made concessions – on supplying real-time data and allowing separate “lanes” for goods entering and remaining in Northern Ireland, respectively. This will ease GB-NI trade – no mean feat – though I remain sceptical that it will remove the need for all checks or paperwork.
As for governance, whatever tweaks are made to the role of the EU’s court or to satisfy demands that Northern Ireland should have a say over the laws which govern it, there remains another constant. Some EU law will apply in Northern Ireland, or there will have to be a border between it and the Republic to the south. No non-member state will get a vote on those laws. And the ultimate arbiter of them will remain the European Court of Justice.
So some slight variation in terms of how the Protocol will function in practice, but the basic principles will remain as they were.
Which brings us to the politics. The key obstacle to a resolution of the dispute over the Protocol to date has been the opposition of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland and of Brexiters in the Conservative Party.
The signs to date are not encouraging. Early signs are that Tory Brexiters have not been convinced. And today at Prime Minister’s Questions today, the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson demanded that the Prime Minister rewrite the “legally binding treaty text” – mistaking a constant for a variable.
It seems that the UK Government and the EU can come to an agreement on how to make the current Protocol work better. But they’re going to struggle to do so in a way which convinces the key political constituencies here. And, while no formal vote on any deal that maintains the Protocol is legally necessary, aggravating large sections of his own party would hardly strengthen Rishi Sunak’s already fragile position.
All of which begs the question: what the hell has the Prime Minister been up to? Did he really think he could simply tweak the current deal and get away with it? Has he not at least come up with some kind of offer for his potential opponents that might make them consider supporting him in return for other concessions? Had he not watched the events of the last few years and learned any lessons from them?
It’s all conducive to a profound sense of déjà vu. Like David Cameron and Theresa May before him, it seems that Sunak has negotiated a deal he is slightly ashamed to spell out to his own troops, let alone defend to the hilt. Once again, the trade-offs that Brexit imposes are left implicit rather than being confronted: if the UK is outside the single market and the customs union, there must either be a border within the island of Ireland or between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Little wonder that, once again, we seem set to have arrived at a Brexit impasse.
Anand Menon is Director of UK in a Changing Europe