Opinion

Newton Emerson: EU must shoulder some of the blame for Brexit chaos

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

The backstop has got what it deserved - something I take no pleasure from, as a supporter of a Brexit sea border.

The backstop is the EU’s demand for a fall back solution to the border problem, in case it is not solved by an overall trading arrangement in the UK’s final withdrawal deal.

London and Brussels have yet to agree a definition of the backstop but in general it implies a soft sea border to avoid a hard land border.

In recent months, with increasing frequency as Brexit talks have stumbled, the EU has spoken of “de-dramatising” the sea border aspect of the backstop to debunk Westminster and unionist fears. Senior Brussels negotiators have issued cast-iron assurances they are not seeking to dismember the UK and the sea border they envisage will not be significantly different in principle to the one that exists today for agrifood regulation.

The four Brexiteer amendments passed in Westminster on Monday simply take those assurances at face value - albeit with cynicism and ulterior motives of Tory infighting.

The amendments make a customs and VAT sea border unlawful but say nothing about regulatory differences, meaning Northern Ireland could effectively remain within the EU single market for goods.

That is as much of a backstop as London has ever said it will agree to, so the British government’s support for the amendments represents no change in policy (at least on balance - it has retreated on VAT, but if anything been more flexible on regulation.)

The Conservative MPs behind this, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, have hostile agendas against the prime minister and her Brexit strategy, such as it is.

But the DUP, which helped move and back the amendments, says it only wants to “put down a marker” to stop the government accepting any further differences between Britain and Northern Ireland than in last week’s Brexit white paper.

The DUP deserves to be believed on this because its achievement is so modest - its ‘marker’ barely protects the UK’s single market, either in the backstop or the final Brexit deal.

Reaction from other parties in Northern Ireland has been priceless.

Of the four amendments, two were put to a vote in the Commons and both passed by just three votes, meaning Sinn Féin could have stopped them.

This has led to an uncharacteristic republican silence, revealing that all the hysteria we could otherwise have expected from them matters less than their pompous abstentionism.

That silence has highlighted the doom-mongering from the SDLP and Alliance, who immediately said the amendments make a hard border almost inevitable and thus threaten peace and the Good Friday Agreement.

The only way these warnings stack up is if both parties want a rock-hard sea border in the backstop - and if that does not breach the agreement, a hard land border certainly does not. The SDLP and Alliance have opened themselves up to accusations of cynicism and other agendas.

However, the basic fault lies with the EU for introducing this bizarre negotiating process in the first place.

It is commonly said in Northern Ireland that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. The Brexit talks Brussels has designed, as the Article 50 mechanism entitles it to do, are instead a three-step sequence requiring resolution of the UK’s exit payment, the border and the final trade deal, one item at a time in that order.

Step two requires an answer to step three - but rather than address both together, Brussels invented the backstop to keep the sequence going.

The backstop is no guarantee against failure - in practice, it would be unenforceable in the event of a no-deal Brexit. It just means agreeing a worst-case scenario for Northern Ireland before attempting to reach a better-case scenario, which is obviously divisive and pointless.

If the Good Friday Agreement had been negotiated like this, everyone would have had to agree rules of engagement for another round of the Troubles before they could discuss anything else.

Critics of the EU, most famously former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, have accused it of designing talks to fail in its interests.

A kinder and more plausible explanation in this case is that Brussels wanted to demonstrate it was prioritising the interests of a member state, namely Ireland, over those of the departing UK, and got hung up on a technicality to prove it.

The restrained response from Brussels and Dublin to the Westminster chaos of recent weeks suggests they accept their insistence on a backstop has backfired.

newton@irishnews.com