Flawed Brexit deal sells out Northern Ireland and kicks the can down the road

It is symptomatic of today’s spun politics, aggravated by groupthink in media reporting, that the Brexit trade agreement is chiefly garnering praise for being the one thing that it is not. Boris Johnson initiated this spin on Christmas Eve when he claimed “we’ve also today resolved a question that has bedevilled our politics for decades”.

This mantra was quickly taken up by politicians and commentators on all sides, in an emotional spasm of relief that the years of “banging on about Europe” and the subsequent post-referendum civil war were over. But, of course, they are not. The sole outcome that could have secured a final settlement of the European question, whatever its other disadvantages, was a no deal Brexit. In years to come, that reality will become more apparent.

Everywhere, the agreement is being canvassed as bringing harmony, finality and closure to a vexed question: that is mere wishful thinking. Take, for example, the issue of fishing rights, where Boris promised “prodigious amounts of fish” and ended up reducing the Europeans’ catch by only 25 per cent. This was not only a shameful surrender to the piratical instincts of Emmanuel Macron but, like all appeasement programmes, merely a delaying mechanism. These acrimonious negotiations will have to be resumed in 2026; why would we assume the EU will be any more amenable by then? This one will run and run.

And so will many other issues. Despite the agreement’s festive Christmas wrapping and hype about a final settlement, in reality this measure is just a more heavily cosmeticised old favourite: kicking the can down the road. Next year there will be a debate over whether to link the UK’s domestic carbon-pricing scheme with Brussels’ arrangements. Look out, too, for a potential row over the continued storage of EU citizens’ data on British servers. Beyond that, every British attempt to advance our national interest by initiating some necessary divergence from EU regulations will become a cause célèbre in Brussels. Every minute change will be made the occasion for harassment and threats of sanctions by the EU.

Ahead lies an endless road through renegotiations of minutiae – and more important issues – of all kinds. It will be as if an agreement had never been reached. Brussels lawyers have sown so many caltrops in the fine print of the agreement that much of our commercial life will have tendrils of EU influence embedded in it for many years to come. Nor do we even have certainty regarding financial services equivalence, where the EU has reserved to itself the final decision – a powerful weapon in the hands of Brussels.

But it is not only in trade and commercial matters that the EU has insidiously embedded its pretensions to authority. Under “Governance/EU preconditions” the agreement concedes: “Reciprocal ability to suspend [the agreement] in case of serious and systemic concerns on data protection or terminate in case of particular human rights concerns.” That sounds reasonable and unthreatening, since Britain is not noted for abuse of human rights. However, the text adds: “agreement terminated on date of leaving European Convention Human Rights”.

So, Brussels has appointed itself the gatekeeper of Britain’s membership of the ECHR, the legal straitjacket regularly exploited to prevent deportation of illegal immigrants, including terrorists. Much has been made of Britain’s escape from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, but this sly clause compels us to accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, even if government, parliament and the electorate were to wish to end it, on pain of Part 3 of the agreement being terminated.

The Brussels mentality is unchanging. It thinks in terms of sanctions, imposed de haute en bas, as if the United Kingdom were still part of its empire. That is why the short pain of a no deal Brexit would have been preferable in the long term. Brussels does not conceal the fact that it sees us as a rebel colony: since 2016 Britain has been regarded in Brussels much as Rhodesia was in London from 1965.

Brussels rightly fears that Brexit, especially if Britain prospers independently at a time when the EU is facing multiple crises, could prove to be the first in an eventual series of secessions. When the 2016 referendum result took the UK out of Brussels’ empire, despite the subsequent manoeuvres of empire loyalists at Westminster, the next ploy was to offer us devolution, via the Theresa May deal. When that, too, failed, all that was left to the EU was to temper our independence deal with as many imperial leftovers as possible.

But Brussels went further than that and, in one area, has scored a victory as outstanding as the British government’s pusillanimity. There has been much hand-wringing about the post-Brexit threat to the Union from putative Scottish independence. In fact, for all its other faults, Boris’s agreement has comprehensively destroyed that SNP ambition. Boris Johnson has shot Nicola Sturgeon’s fox. The First Minister desperately wanted a no deal Brexit as the springboard for IndyRef2. The trade agreement was the worst news for Scottish nationalists since they heard the score from the Battle of Flodden.

The real danger to the Union comes from another quarter: Northern Ireland. When Boris boasts that we have taken back control of our borders, he is being too modest. We have done better than that: we have actually acquired a brand-new border, between Britain and Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Protocol contains by far the worst sell-out in the entire agreement.

When the prospect of a border down the Irish Sea was first mooted in the post-Brexit negotiations, the then prime minister Theresa May said: “The draft legal text the Commission have published would, if implemented, undermine the UK common market and threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK by creating a customs and regulatory border down the Irish Sea, and no UK prime minister could ever agree to it.”

Wrong, Theresa: one just did – Boris Johnson. It seems what was, at least rhetorically, a cession of sovereignty too far for Remainer Theresa May was acceptable to Leave leader Boris Johnson. Within 48 hours of the parliamentary debate on the Brexit agreement, Northern Ireland will be part of the EU Single Market, in common with the Irish Republic, and Britain will not. Northern Ireland will have membership of the EU Customs Union, like the Irish Republic, and Britain will not.

The European Union will have a permanent presence in Northern Ireland, supposedly as intrinsic a part of Britain as Wiltshire, with EU officials resident there. Would we tolerate such an imperial presence in Wiltshire? So, why in Northern Ireland? Our weak politicians succumbed to all the fantasy propaganda spun by Brussels, Dublin and the faux-Irish caucus in Washington, claiming that the mildest inspection of goods on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would provoke a full-blown resurgence of the Troubles.

Why did anyone lend a moment’s credence to such nonsense? The people of Northern Ireland went through hell for three decades, at a cost of more than 3,000 lives: what intelligent person believes they would embrace that nightmare again if a few lorries were inspected on the Irish border? The grievances that provoked the insurgency in the late 1960s were of a wholly different order and have long been redressed.

Visible border posts (unnecessary, in any case, under modern technology,) might have provoked attacks by a lunatic fringe of republican militants, but those could easily have been contained. But why, now, is there not similar concern about violence against EU officials and installations by loyalist paramilitaries? The whole scare-mongering scam was a total irrelevance, deployed by Brussels and Dublin to gull the credulous and make further inroads into Northern Ireland’s membership of the United Kingdom.

That has been eroded successively by the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 which, against all constitutional practice, gave Dublin a locus in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. That tendency was reinforced by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In both measures, there was an American involvement, such as the United States would never have tolerated by a foreign power in its internal affairs.

When the Grande Peur over the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit was being generated by Brussels, Dublin, Washington and British Remainers, the weasel term “island of Ireland” implicitly played to the irredentist ambitions of Dublin. Yet, on 2 October 2019, the DUP endorsed the trade border solution that allegedly has now impelled them to vote against the agreement.

The constitutional position is straightforward. The United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy: for so long as fifty percent plus one of Northern Ireland voters wish to remain in the United Kingdom, they are welcome; should they vote to leave and join the Republic, that right will be respected, with no Brussels-style attempts to undermine a referendum result. Demographic changes and wafer-thin opinion poll majorities suggest that may happen. Until then, Northern Ireland is an intrinsic part of the United Kingdom – like Wiltshire – and to Balkanise the UK with internal borders, at the behest of a foreign entity, is the antithesis of democracy.

This agreement is infinitely preferable to anything confected by Theresa May. But for the gurus in the ERG’s pompously named Star Chamber to claim that “the Agreement preserves the UK’s sovereignty as a matter of law and fully respects the norms of international sovereign-to-sovereign treaties”, when foreign customs officers are policing the passage of goods from one part of the United Kingdom to another is unpersuasive. Perhaps they take refuge in sophistry, insofar as the most sovereignty-suppressing part of the treaty is contained in a separate protocol.

This is not a total sell-out. There are good grounds for believing that an independent and sovereign Britain, once it adjusts to independence, will eventually shake off the irritating Brussels terrier yapping at its heels. Much of the agreement will work. Boris has not given us another Munich, but it looks dismayingly like Potsdam. In terminology familiar to him, it is more than just the end of the beginning, but it is far short of the end. Only no deal would have brought full closure; as it is, there will be more trench warfare to come.