There’s going to be a deal on the protocol. There was always going to be because the UK government has no choice, never had.
It’s just that a settlement has become more urgent in the last four months since the Conservatives crashed the British economy. Years of Johnson and a month of Truss have left the UK isolated, friendless and justifiably universally distrusted.
All that requires a reset of relations with Britain’s nearest trading neighbours because Brexit has reduced GDP by 5.5 per cent. That means the economy is £120bn smaller and there’s £40bn less tax available than if Johnson (and Donaldson’s) Brexit hadn’t happened. Sunak has to move quickly to try to rectify this mess: it’s the only reason he’s prime minister. Small businesses, chambers of commerce and industry in Britain are begging for action to make trade with the EU simpler and quicker. Some have given up the ghost, others have moved to mainland Europe. Here, because the protocol works, businesses can trade freely with the EU and Britain. Don’t believe a word of Donaldson’s false prospectus.
On top of all this is the British government’s anxiety to repair relations with the US. Everyone knows the best way to do that is to seal a deal so that President Biden can visit Ireland to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. American pressure on Sunak will be enormous; a lot of it behind the scenes on matters like military equipment, intelligence sharing and involving Britain in US-EU cooperation rather than ignoring the British in preference to Germany and France.
So what will Jeffrey ‘I could live with 40,000 job losses’ Donaldson do when the deal happens? The clue is in that telling answer when confronted with the economic consequences of the Brexit he was advocating: he doesn’t care about the economic consequences or people’s prosperity. He’s hung up on nonsense about non-existent constitutional consequences which, even if true, which they’re not, would have no effect on people’s lives or livelihoods. All he wanted from Brexit was a hard British border in Ireland. Misled by Donaldson, the DUP resembles the Taliban. For them, like their Afghan counterparts, it’s theological dogma that matters even if it’s balderdash and no matter how disruptive.
We all know, even Donaldson must, that any deal will be far from Donaldson’s ‘seven tests’ which amount to abolishing the protocol: that was never going to happen. Contrary to some sanguine unionist observers Donaldson has left himself no room for manoeuvre and hasn’t even been looking for a ladder to climb down. He fears the uncompromising obstinate rhetoric of Jim Allister and incoherent loyalist bloggers. His failure to lead unionism away from their beloved victimhood trope lost him over 50,000 votes in May 2022.
There’s no chance Donaldson will go into an assembly campaign supporting a UK-EU deal. His failed, cowering leadership would split unionism spectacularly.
There’s even less chance Donaldson would fight such an election before April and enter an executive as deputy first minister – thereby accepting a protocol deal – with local council elections due on May 18. His obsession with ‘unionist unity’ is a fantasy. There hasn’t been ‘unionist unity’ since 1968 and even then it was a façade as events the following year showed. Still, none of that stops Donaldson pursuing his Hy-Brasil, that mythical destination in the west only visible one day every seven years. His delusion that ‘unionist unity’ once achieved would enable him to overtake Sinn Féin, become first minister and restore politics in the north to its planned purpose of unionist dominance is just as much a mirage as Hy-Brasil.
His obsession demonstrates that he has an irony by-pass for who has been the most disruptive splitter of unionism in the last thirty years? Why, none other than the same Donaldson who walked out on David Trimble in 1998 and spent the next five years successfully splitting the UUP.
