Regardless of denials it’s clear the anti-protocol bill has been paused in the Lords.
The Sunday Times received a statement from Downing Street which said: “We are not asking the whips to bring it back to the Lords now. We want to give negotiations the best chance.” What chance is there?
There’s obviously been movement from the British at last. Last week it emerged that HMRC had produced (finally) in October a database designed for EU requirements so that goods travelling to the north from Britain could be tracked and checked electronically. The British had promised it in 2020 but reneged. The EU has been testing the database since November 7 and finding 16 per cent of goods are deemed at risk of crossing the border.
For its part the EU has adopted new rules on December 1, ‘to enforce our agreements with the UK’, which make it simpler to initiate a trade war with the UK if the anti-protocol bill became law. These rules enable the EU to hit the UK with quotas and tariffs on exports.
It’s no secret what’s going on. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt know Brexit is an economic disaster. Sunak wants to cut a deal on the protocol and then move to mitigate the dreadful deal Boris Johnson and David Frost rushed into in 2020. However, the second can’t come before a deal on the protocol. That’s where he runs into difficulties for he is in a weak position in Westminster. We’ve already seen that demonstrated in the last fortnight when he caved in to disparate groups of MPs on mandatory housing quotas, on onshore wind farms and, most humiliatingly, on a new coal mine in Cumbria.
It seems he’s afraid to alienate, let alone stand up to, any cabal of MPs.
On the vital question of the protocol, the resolution of which is essential to his plans to sidle closer to the EU, Sunak has to deal with the infamous cabal which has dogged the Conservative party’s relationship with truth and reason throughout the last seven years, the so-called European Research Group which is neither European nor does any research. It’s our misfortune to have two of its Brexit Ultras or Brextremists, whatever you want to call them, occupying the NIO, the current proconsul and his unpredictably prolix sidekick Steve Baker. Let’s not forget these two, both former chairs of the ERG, are among the culprits who caused the problems in what passes for politics in the north. Equally they are likely to be the obstacle to any solution to those problems.
People bang on about checks and paperwork and databases and sausages, but for these guys it’s the European Court of Justice that’s the problem. These guys live in a nonsensical fantasy world of, wait for it, ‘sovereign global Britain’. For them the ECJ makes Britain a ‘vassal state’. Streamlining checks on goods travelling to the north and agreeing the technicalities of databases would still leave the ECJ with the final say on what comes in and on VAT rates and state aid to businesses. As Britain diverges from EU rules the role of the ECJ will inevitably increase, a matter of dogmatic importance for the two amigos at the NIO.
A few weeks ago Baker circulated a paper proposing that the protocol be moved from the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement so it could be renegotiated whereas it can’t be in the WA. That’s a non-starter, but it’s an indication that Sunak is up against serious unreasoning opposition in trying to reach an accommodation with the EU – acknowledged now as priority number one – and come in from the wilderness into which people like our proconsul and Baker have cast Britain.
Given his weakness so far in dealing with opposition, the prospects are not great that the inexperienced Sunak will be able to prevail over the group used to wrecking prime ministers’ careers.
