Enough dithering – the Northern Ireland Protocol must be abolished

Here we go again, round and round the mulberry bush of Brexit negotiations – in May, 2022, more than two years after Britain’s departure from the European Union. If that seems startling, it is also safe to predict that, after another two years – conceivably even after 20 years – we shall be embarking on yet another round of negotiations to fine-tune the previous “fix” designed to make the Northern Ireland Protocol bearable.

Why do we tolerate this farce? Boris Johnson, who consented to the Protocol in the first instance, is trying to appease Northern Ireland unionists by going through the motions of tinkering with the Protocol. Tinkering is much in vogue among those elements of the Conservative Party and government sufficiently intelligent to see disaster brewing in Northern Ireland, but not sufficiently brave to take the necessary and obvious step of abolishing the unsustainable Protocol in its entirety before it wreaks further havoc.

That, of course, is what it was designed to do. The Protocol was invented by Brussels to retain a degree of power even in post-Brexit Britain by retaining Northern Ireland within the Single Market, under a different regime from the rest of the United Kingdom. The pretext dreamed up by Brussels was the need to “protect” the Good Friday Agreement. That was a ludicrous posture: the EU was not a party to the Agreement, has no locus in matters relating to it and no role in “protecting” it.

On the contrary, the regulations embodied in the Protocol which Brussels imposed on Britain, the actual guarantor of the Agreement, have reduced the constitutional life of Northern Ireland to paralysis and chaos – as they were intended to do by a revanchist Brussels nomenklatura set on punishing Britain for its presumptuous departure from the cartel. If diplomats want to voice inanities about our European “friends” and “neighbours” that is conventional courtesy; but no one in the real world should fail to confront the fact that the EU, corporately, is our inveterate enemy and its realpolitik objective is the punitive break-up of the United Kingdom.

To this end, as soon as Brexit became a serious prospect, Brussels took up the alarmed cry of the Dublin government: “No hard border on the island of Ireland!” Groupthink quickly embraced this flight from reality, as those who aspired to take a “sophisticated” view of the situation parroted the maxim until it became axiomatic even, to some extent, among Leave circles. What nobody troubled to ask was: Why? What was so exceptional about “the island of Ireland” that, unlike any other country in the world, it could not tolerate a land frontier?

The cobbled-together pretext was that if a border with customs posts – such as had previously existed for more than half a century – were established, republican paramilitaries would be so provoked as to revert to armed struggle. This ignored the fact that, with or without customs posts, the border existed as a geopolitical fact: surely that was what irked republicans, not arrangements for checking goods crossing the sole land frontier between the United Kingdom and the European Union?

The notion that paramilitary forces should exercise a veto on customs arrangements between two sovereign states was intrinsically anarchic; beyond that, it was partisan in that, on no empirical evidence, it assumed that loyalist paramilitaries would not be inflamed by the creative transfer of the border to the Irish Sea, in the same way that republicans supposedly would be by a land border. In the terminology of our transatlantic allies, the whole argument was a crock.

It served, however, for Brussels to recalibrate constitutional and fiscal arrangements in Northern Ireland, that is to say within the United Kingdom, to create a simulacrum of a united Ireland. The border, notionally, ran down the Irish Sea. Goods travelling from Swindon to Portadown, while never leaving UK territory, were subject to harassing customs checks in Northern Ireland. A team of EU officials took up residence in Northern Ireland to enforce Single Market regulations, in the post-Brexit UK. What is this – Transnistria?

So oppressive is the EU regime that trade between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland has fallen by 12 per cent, while trade in Irish goods with Northern Ireland has increased by 50 per cent, exactly as Brussels intended. Of all the checks made along the EU’s 14,647km land border with 21 third countries, 20 per cent are made on the imaginary border between Britain and Northern Ireland. That is the scale of EU harassment.

This is intolerable for a sovereign nation. Brussels’ malign imposition has provoked a situation where the illusion of a united Ireland has been created, with the political impact contributing to the situation where Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, is now the largest party at Stormont. No democrat could object to Irish unification if, in a legitimate referendum, a majority of Northern Ireland voters opted for that outcome. However, free and informed consent should be independent of Brussels manipulation.

As things stand, despite a demographic swing to the culturally Catholic and nationalist elements among the electorate, there is little evidence of a firm disposition by Northern Ireland electors to opt for Dublin rule in the near future. The economic and geopolitical skies are dark, so that people will think twice before effecting any drastic change in their circumstances. There are now two issues that need to be addressed, independently of domestic Northern Irish politics.

The first is the need for the Republic of Ireland to embrace reality. The border between it and the United Kingdom does not run down the Irish Sea; it runs across Irish soil for 320 miles, between the counties of Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh and Down, on the north, and Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth, on the south. That is the frontier that was negotiated between Britain and Ireland, albeit as reluctantly as Boris Johnson agreed to the Northern Ireland Protocol. It can be changed by only one mechanism: a decision, by referendum, of a majority of electors living on the northern side of that internationally recognised frontier to join the Republic.

It is time for Ireland to stop prevaricating about the Good Friday Agreement and take ownership of its own boundaries. Ireland is generally considered an enterprising free-market state; yet its self-perception remains clouded by myth. It is understandable that, even now, Irish people should harbour anti-British sentiment, considering Ireland’s appalling treatment by Britain over centuries; but that should not be allowed to cloud objective realities regarding real-life borders. The same mythology affects Ireland’s perception of itself as an iconic neutral state: when they are waking up and smelling the coffee in Sweden and Finland, it is time for Ireland, whose coasts are increasingly infested by Russian naval vessels, to ask itself if De Valera’s doctrine remains the most effective guarantee of security in 2022.

But the country that, even more than Ireland, needs to take ownership of its borders is Britain. There is no point in snipping away at the Northern Ireland Protocol, it needs to be weeded out, root and branch. In fairness to Boris, he held his nose and swallowed it at a time when a feral Parliament had come within a whisker of nullifying the verdict of a national referendum, breaking the political contract with the electorate and ending even the illusion of parliamentary democracy.

Now, however, it is time to rip out the last malignant tendrils of EU control from British society. The only solution is to abolish the NI Protocol in its entirety. “That would violate international law!” shriek “One Nation” (code for wet Remainer) Tories. Oh, would it really? Then how does it happen that Britain has been renouncing similar treaties, at a rate of almost two a year, for the past three decades, without provoking sanction or even comment?

We know the details, chapter and verse, following a written question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on 13 November 2018: “To ask Her Majesty’s Government on how many occasions since 1988 they have unilaterally withdrawn from their obligations under international treaties.” The answer, on 27 November 2018, was: “The UK has unilaterally withdrawn from 52 treaties since 1 January 1988. All of these have been multilateral treaties.”

So, when European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic states that “unilateral actions are not acceptable” he is swimming against the tide of diplomatic practice. Treaties are for mutual convenience: when they become vexatious to one contracting party, withdrawal is the sensible norm. When Sefcovic went on to warn that if Britain renounced elements of the Protocol, the EU would “respond with all measures at its disposal”, he provoked the suspicion that Vladimir Putin is writing his speeches.

If Brussels is weaponising all measures at its disposal to punish tinkering with the Protocol, then Britain might as well abolish the whole kit and caboodle. That is what we need to do: lance the boil once and for all, and put Brexit firmly behind us.

“That would launch a trade war,” moan the Vichy appeasers. The UK is the EU’s second largest partner as a recipient of exports, accounting for 13 per cent of the EU’s total exports. Last year the EU enjoyed a trade surplus with the UK of €138bn. For Brussels to disrupt that favourable situation by embarking on a trade war, provoked by wounded amour-propre regarding its repudiated suzerainty over Northern Ireland, would be a kamikaze strategy. The clinical term for such behaviour is self-harm.

Why is a British government that, after Ukraine, has been the most prominent in standing up to Russian aggression, so afraid of the self-regarding clowns in Brussels? When we see, in Mariupol and elsewhere, the suffering that Ukrainians are enduring to preserve their sovereignty, it is shaming to see Britain’s reluctance to face down the hollow Brussels bullies, tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol and lead the whole United Kingdom into an enterprising post-Brexit future.