NI Protocol: Will EU concessions be enough?

The UK and EU are back on the Brexit merry-go-round as they try once again to break the deadlock over trade relations in Northern Ireland. The EU has announced “far-reaching” proposals to smooth out issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol, which attempts to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland by creating a customs border for goods in the Irish Sea instead.

The package assembled by Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission’s vice-president, involves scrapping the majority of border checks on British goods entering NI. Food standards rules will be relaxed, allowing supermarkets to continue to supply NI and the ban on chilled meat entering the country will end.

The proposals come after Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, called for a complete renegotiation of the Protocol in a strident speech in Lisbon on Tuesday in which he said that EU intransigence was putting the Irish peace process at risk.

Frost suggested that EU tinkering wouldn’t be enough, and that a full overhaul was needed. A new-look deal must involve getting rid of the European Court of Justice’s continued jurisdiction in Northern Ireland. The current situation means 1.9m people have no say over the rules the EU imposes upon them in matters relating to the single market.

The EU’s concessions are an acknowledgment that the burden of checks and anomalies in the current rules mean the Protocol isn’t working well for the people of Northern Ireland. It is framing the measures as generous, practical solutions to problems on the ground.

But the bloc is refusing to budge on ECJ jurisdiction. The EU’s position is that the UK signed the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement and has to live with the consequences. Adapting it is one thing – and the EU would say it has bent over backwards with its latest offer – but Frost’s idea to rip it up and start again when the ink is barely dry is seen as reneging and therefore completely unacceptable.

On the matter of the ECJ and NI’s democratic deficit, the EU could point to the country’s unique status of being in both the UK customs union as well as the EU customs union and single market for goods, as part of the trade-off that Boris Johnson’s government negotiated and signed up to, and trumpeted as a huge success. See Walter Ellis’s take on the EU offer below.

Allegations are swirling that the British do not want the Protocol to work and are negotiating in bad faith. Ireland’s deputy premier Leo Varadkar warned world leaders not to enter into any agreement until they could be sure the UK would keep to its promises, after Dominic Cummings’ latest snipe from the sidelines in which he claimed it was always the plan to ditch parts of the deal the UK didn’t like.

What’s irking the British is that, until now, Brussels has been denying that problems caused by the Protocol could be fixed and/or accusing the British of exaggerating them.

Will “Frosty the no man” say yes to the offer?

Much depends on whether his rhetoric on the ECJ is part of a hard-ball negotiation strategy on the UK’s part or a genuine “red line”.

As the New Statesman’s Tim Ross puts it, we are back in Brexit Negotiation Land, where “nobody ever says what they mean, positions are taken only to be abandoned or denied, deals are ‘oven ready’ and yet still half-baked.”

EU officials are meeting their UK counterparts for talks this evening and tomorrow to hash it out. It could be that the EU has offered enough to Britain while keeping enough back for both sides to claim victory, and a line is drawn under the affair. If the last five years are anything to go by, it won’t be quite that simple.