Opinion

Brian Feeney: Hopelessly confused DUP has been duped again on a hard border

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Lord Frost's departure as Brexit minister marks a wholesale reset in negotiations with the EU Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.
Lord Frost's departure as Brexit minister marks a wholesale reset in negotiations with the EU Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire. Lord Frost's departure as Brexit minister marks a wholesale reset in negotiations with the EU Photo: Aaron Chown/PA Wire.

On or about December 10 Foreign Office officials briefed a group of EU journalists that the UK was backing down from its uncompromising post-Brexit line on all matters European.

On December 11 the British granted 23 outstanding fishing licences to France and the Channel island Jersey also granted licences. December 10 had been the French deadline before initiating litigation and counter measures.

The “change in tone” of British negotiations, including on the Irish protocol, was duly noted in EU media. It was reported that Lord Frost’s demand in July for the removal of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction had been dropped. The skids were under Frost and he knew it. A week later he handed in his resignation, to take effect at the end of January, not soon enough for Johnson. Frost’s resignation was duly leaked to the Mail on Sunday and he left immediately to be instantly replaced by Liz Truss.

It’s a wholesale reset. Compromise not confrontation is the new watchword. Instead of the aggressive and bumptious Frost on a solo run as Europe minister sans department, the Foreign Office takes over with Truss assisted by Chris Heaton-Harris as Minister for Europe. After all, European policy should be the remit of the Foreign Office. All that guff in Frost’s resignation letter about the missed opportunities of Brexit was designed to damage Johnson with the hard right of the Tory party. He didn’t mention the fact that his failed protocol grandstanding had been jettisoned. Simon Hoare, chair of the NI Affairs Committee, summed it up well. He wasn’t sorry at Frost’s departure he said, adding that, “He was unsuited to the ‘doing of politics’, never understood the need for personal rapport or the importance of trust.”

Liz Truss is a canny politician having been a minister in four departments under three prime ministers. The darling of the Eurosceptics, even though she voted Remain, and was once a Lib Dem, she will talk tough, but loyally carry out Johnson’s policy, which isn’t. That may offend her admirers in the Conservative party but she will have been made aware of the compelling economic and fiscal reasons why Britain, impoverished by Brexit and Covid, can’t afford a trade war with the EU and hostility from Biden’s USA.

Now, is there a trickle-down effect? You’ve read here before that Jeffrey Donaldson labours under the delusion he’s a player, but was really a crash-test dummy in Frost’s anti-EU strategy. Given that his fantasy has collided with reality will he too reset and if so, how? How does he extricate himself from the hole he has dug since last February? It’s clear the protocol is here to stay, the ECJ’s jurisdiction is here to stay, and the Irish Sea border, (which Donaldson has taken to targeting recently rather than mentioning the protocol) is also permanent. Trade with Britain will never return to the system that existed before the Brexit that Donaldson voted for in Westminster.

We now know that Donaldson’s threats to collapse the executive were and are empty. Even Donaldson must see how absurd and contradictory it is to claim falsely the protocol is damaging the Good Friday Agreement (which he never supported) while at the same time damaging the GFA by unlawfully boycotting the North-South Ministerial Council. As the UK and EU head towards a deal on the protocol at the end of January, settle their fisheries disputes and accept UK involvement in the €80 billion EU research programme Horizon Europe, what has Donaldson got to show for a year’s futile opposition to British policy?

A hopelessly confused and divided party, misled by his pompous, portentous language, behaving preposterously as if he was a negotiator on behalf of “the people of Northern Ireland”, now you’ll note modified to the “people who vote for us” – fewer daily. After five years, hoping for a hard border in Ireland the DUP, duped and duped again.