Let’s cut through the dissembling, and downright falsehoods British ministers spout about the protocol and look at the malign hypocrisy Johnson’s Brexit government is engaged in around the future of a Stormont administration.
The fact is the DUP’s opposition to the protocol suits the British government. So much so that its negotiator David Frost last year was weaponising DUP/TUV opposition in his attempts to unravel what he’d agreed in 2019. It required a formal diplomatic démarche – an unprecedented reprimand – from Yael Lempert, President Biden’s chargé d’affaires in London, on June 3 last year to put a halt to his gallop. The US warned Britain, and specifically Frost, not to “inflame tensions” in Ireland.
The truth is Britain never intended to implement the protocol. Several senior ministers, including Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove and former chief adviser Cummings, have confirmed that. The reason there are problems with the protocol is that the British refuse to operate it. They are in breach of the agreement since last summer and EU legal action is pending. The British didn’t build inspection sheds, wouldn’t label goods for sale in the north only, wouldn’t give the EU access to customs and excise data as required. An EU report last summer found that the required inspections at Larne and Belfast aren’t being carried out. The British unilaterally extended so-called ‘grace periods’ on imports of chilled meat. And so on and so on.
Playing up DUP intransigence fits perfectly with that British position. The deep hypocrisy at play is unfathomable. RTÉ’s northern editor Vincent Kearney put it best when he said the British and the DUP are acting like a wrestling tag team: one steps out of the ring as another steps in with a new assault. The DUP boycott allows the Brexit government to step into the ring and protest to the EU that the protocol, designed by the EU to protect the Good Friday Agreement, is damaging the GFA because the DUP is boycotting the institutions.
In fact Johnson’s government doesn’t give tuppence for the GFA, never gave it a second thought as they pursued the hardest Brexit they could. It was the EU which insisted that procedures were established to avoid a hard British border in Ireland and designed the ingenious protocol. It can’t be emphasised too often that the attraction of a hard Brexit for the DUP was for them a win-win: a hard British border in Ireland and scuppering the GFA. Now, make no mistake, that’s what they’re still after.
Ideally the DUP/TUV would love the British to ‘disapply’ the protocol which is essentially what they’re demanding. That would leave the EU single market border in Ireland open which the DUP hope would require the EU to set up customs posts. You’ll notice neither the DUP nor their Brexit government allies have ever proposed any alternative.
The EU, certainly with its newly installed French and German governments, will not give in to the British endorsed DUP blackmail, not least because they’ll protect the Republic as a member state, but also because neither Scholz nor Macron trusts a word that comes out of Johnson’s mouth. Besides, why trust the British with a new deal? The EU can also point out that in last Thursday’s election 55 per cent of voters elected parties who support the protocol.
What’s going to happen? If Johnson’s record is anything to go by he’ll huff and he’ll puff but he won’t blow the house down. Not now with the British economy collapsing round his ears, the pound devalued 10 per cent in the last month and inflation predicted to reach 10 per cent in the autumn. Everything he does is solely to hang on to office until the party conference in October. Proposals for anti-protocol legislation couldn’t come in before the autumn anyway. In the meantime he and his ministers will keep up their mendacious rhetoric.
No wonder exasperated Maros Sefcovic appealed for Britain “to be honest”. Hah.
