Abolish the Northern Ireland Protocol

“The next Brexit battle.” What does it say about British politics and its practitioners that, six years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and two and a half years after our supposed departure, that headline appeared this week in a current affairs journal? Will we never hear the end of Brexit? Not in the foreseeable future, is the dispiriting answer, and it is the fault of our own government since, for all Boris’s buccaneering ways, it remains marinated in the bien-pensant prescriptions of the political class. What we are dealing with in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, as with the immigration crisis, is not so much concrete issues as a mentality or worldview, shared across party lines and professions by Britain’s entitled elites.

There was never any question of members of those elites assessing the proposition that Britain should leave the EU in the same way that mere mortals, arguing the issue in the bar of the Mucky Duck, did: weighing the pros and cons, the ease of holiday travel against the plundering of our fishing grounds, etc. and voting accordingly.

For the elites, there was no such freedom of choice: Britain’s membership of the EU was an axiom, a dogma. Although insufficiently integrated, only this country’s immersion in the European Union could ensure it never again indulged in such reprehensible activity as building an Empire. Among the political class, especially the civil service, there was – and is – a consensus that whenever there is any conflict of interest between Britain and another country, Britain is invariably in the wrong.

The EU seemed to the elites to furnish a very useful constraint, holding Britain supine as in a dentist’s chair, while the Entitled Ones managed its decline and awarded themselves appropriate remuneration for this act of noblesse oblige. Then, abruptly and astonishingly, this enlightened dispensation was shattered by the brutish indiscipline of the lumpen-electorate, voting for Brexit.

After the initial shock, reassurance returned. The whole inelegant, embarrassing mess could easily be cleaned up, by the elitist majority in both Houses of Parliament simply legislating to cancel this incidence of mob rule, to be followed shortly by further legislation to ensure no such plebiscite could ever be held again.

Boris frustrated that ambition, which is why the BBC and a multitude of embittered Remainers have strained every nerve to remove him from office, by inflating reprehensible social gatherings at Number 10 into the equivalent of the American Democrats’ equally inflated January 6 “insurrection” hysteria. The moment at which one’s natural distaste for Boris’s behaviour evaporates is when one sees his enemies.

That is the quasi-religious background to the current spat over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The cultists are in hot pursuit of Boris the blasphemer, who must be punished. Strange though it might seem to normal, well-adjusted Britons, there are people in Parliament and other forums of influence for whom EU jobsworths impeding trade in Northern Ireland represent a precious symbol of residual Brussels power – an EU Kaliningrad exclave auguring future reintegration, when Tobias Ellwood leads us back into the Single Market as a prelude to renewed membership.

It is typical of the ambivalence surrounding Boris that we must simultaneously be grateful to him for breaking the Brexit deadlock and angry with him for not getting Brexit done properly. Because he and his lieutenants were imbued with the groupthink of the political class, nothing was done thoroughly: always a small portion was left on the plate for “Mr Manners”, as mandated by nanny.

Instead of leaving the EU cleanly and finally, we allowed our enemies in Brussels to dig themselves into foxholes in the most sensitive part of the United Kingdom, to pretend that an international border did not run across “the island of Ireland” and cynically to damage the Good Friday Agreement to which they paid lavish lip service.

There are EU officials permanently stationed in Northern Ireland (i.e. in the UK), regulating the passage of goods. This takes the form of shameless harassment: of all checks made along the EU’s 14,647km land frontier with 21 third countries, 20 per cent are carried out along the imaginary border between Britain and Northern Ireland.  That harassment has resulted, as Brussels intended, in trade between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland falling by 12 per cent.

Simultaneously, trade in Irish goods with Northern Ireland has increased by 50 per cent; Brussels planned this, its ultimate hope is to punish Britain and claw back some of its lost territory by promoting Irish reunification. Over the past 18 months, more than 4,000 new EU laws have been imposed on Northern Ireland, including restrictions on imports of steel and New Zealand lamb. What kind of Brexit is that?

While part of the United Kingdom is becoming detached before our eyes, the world and his dog feels at liberty to advise, lecture and threaten Britain about its own affairs. Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State, telephoned Liz Truss to urge Britain to continue with “good faith” to protect the Good Friday Agreement. That is precisely what the government is striving to do, to protect it from the corrosive influence of Brussels’ bad faith, but American Democrats refuse to assess the situation impartially, driven by a party caucus that likes to dress up as leprechauns in New York on St Patrick’s Day.

So, here we go again. The government’s new legislation, the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which will be delayed for months by Remainer elements in both Houses, “will strip the ECJ of many of its powers”. That damns it: it concedes some powers will remain, with European judges being called in to adjudicate on interpretations of EU law. The UK, as a non-member of the EU, should at no time come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice or any of its personnel.

This is what comes of failing to make a clean break – the hysterically misrepresented “No Deal Brexit” – and definitively shaking the dust of Brussels from our feet. Even now, by seeking to whittle down the Protocol rather than totally renouncing it, Boris is creating further problems. There may conceivably be some truth in the claim by Sir Roger Gale, MP for North Thanet: “The legislation appears to be in breach of articles 26 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on international treaties ratified by the UK in 1971.”

That is a hoary old chestnut, but if there is an issue it is solely because Boris is trying to tinker with a treaty from which he should instead be withdrawing. Any problem could only arise because Britain is retaining the treaty instead of scrapping it. As has been quoted here before, in reply to a written question in the House of Lords asking how many times the UK had unilaterally withdrawn from its obligations under international treaties since 1988, the FCO stated on 27 November, 2018: “The UK has unilaterally withdrawn from 52 treaties since 1 January 1988. All of these have been multilateral treaties.”

And nobody even noticed. The government is at complete liberty to withdraw unilaterally from the Northern Ireland Protocol, but it lacks the courage to do so. There is an elitist aversion to downright, decisive action, so we shall be back again in a couple of years’ time, trying to defuse whatever new mines Brussels has strewn in our path. It is the same problem that turned the Rwanda deportation flight into a farce, because Britain has not withdrawn, as it must, from the European Convention on Human Rights. Meanwhile, the starred Firsts in Whitehall are pleading incapacity to eliminate the remaining 2,194 EU laws from the statute book by the perfectly reasonable deadline of June, 2026.

Until our leaders find the resolve to tear out all these tendrils of formerly modish, now detested, international control by extraneous courts and governments, talk of UK sovereignty or “taking back control” will remain absurd. Yet every attempt at reform is hampered by a faction it would be too limiting to describe as “Remainer”, though it is certainly that, but which includes a cross-section of establishment groupthinkers, from woke civil servants to “One Nation” (i.e. Liberal Democrat) Tory MPs. They are putting the Conservative government in deadly danger.

The last, startling eruption of public rage was Brexit. That was primarily about two things: first, sovereignty and, secondly, immigration. The public is currently being treated to the spectacle of both these issues being obstructed by all the usual suspects, from Tory pseudo-paternalists to Anglican bishops, religiously indifferentist but politically partisan.

If Boris Johnson somehow contrives, as in 2019, to articulate and redress the outrage of the public at this renewed suppression of democracy – and obtain solid results – that will be his political salvation. If he fails, there will be no second chance either for him or his party.