Earlier on Monday October 4, David Frost, Boris Johnson’s man for negotiations with Brussels, proclaimed to half the Conservative Party members that “the long nightmare of EU membership was over and was already beginning. The British Renaissance ». Those summoned to the annual congress of political training, in Manchester, have just laid down while the speaker on the platform mentioned, without naming him, the «great national poet» who symbolized the idea of Empire and colonial rule like nobody else: “And soon, all the men wake up to the sound of chains being broken, and each one smiles at his neighbor to tell him that he is the owner of his own soul ”. Frost played Rudyard Kipling, implicitly confirming in his words that Brexit was, and still is, a nostalgic ideological weapon rather than the practical solution to a painful divorce.
London and Brussels are a few steps away from plunging into the abyss and waging a trade war that they are not interested in, because the Johnson government has decided that the commitments it signed at the time are no longer valid. He calls for drastic changes to the Northern Ireland protocol, the most delicate and costly piece in a long negotiation process to complete the UK’s exit from the EU. And more or less extensive adjustments are not enough to alleviate the bureaucratic obstacles that the protocol has caused to employers. Downing Street now wants the cornerstone of that agreement, its oversight by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), to disappear. ‘The role of the CJEU in relation to the protocol never worried anyone … Until it became clear that the specific problems could be solved in a practical way and the British government was left without the spy is clear“Assures Alicantur Fintan O’Toole, the Irish writer and political analyst who most ably penetrated the nature and character of Johnson. “Instead of shouting victory, accepting the generous offer of the EU and lowering the tension in Northern Ireland, they prefer to invent a new and impossible request to blame Brussels when it rejects it,” O’Toole accuses.
With Brexit, as with any labyrinth, it is convenient to pull the thread so as not to lose sight of where the mess started. By leaving the community club, the Republic of Ireland would become the only land border between the UK and the EU. Brussels has tried at all costs, during the exit negotiations, to preserve its most precious treasure: the internal market, which regroups the economic and commercial exchanges of 27 countries under the same rules. However, a second factor came into play in the talks, perhaps without much financial weight, but which required extreme delicacy. The 1998 Good Friday Peace Accords, which ended decades of terrorist and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, imposed a practical and imaginative solution. The border between the two Irishmen became invisible. Any citizen could move from one place to another without detecting the slightest sign of separation, beyond the fact that the coffee or the pint of beer had to be paid in euros or pounds. The imposition of customs controls with the arrival of Brexit, however discreet, ran the risk of awakening ghosts that are still latent.
The solution chosen by London and Brussels was for Northern Ireland to remain part of the EU internal market and to respect its rules. The new frontera, for customs and health surveillance of goods, would be located in the Irish Sea, which separates the two islands. Johnson happily signed a pact that allowed him to present himself to his people as the politician who had finally made Brexit a reality. The truth, however, is always stubborn. And when the conservative politician began to criticize the Northern Ireland Protocol, to the point of blaming the text for even threatening peace in the region, allies and rivals reminded him that that commitment was a sham from the beginning. “Johnson told me personally that once the protocol was signed, they would change it,” Northern Irish union MP Ian Paisley Jr., son of the historian and visceral Reverend Paisley, told the BBC this week. “In fact, he assured me that they would break it into a thousand pieces. They signed it as a last minute shortcut, but the problem is that it has already cost Northern Ireland businessmen almost € 180 million and we cannot afford it, ”said Paisley.
The sanitary and customs controls imposed by the new treaty have caused extraordinary expenses and administrative obstacles to trade flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. It was the so-called ‘sausage war’ between London and Brussels, because much of this tightening of surveillance involved meat products destined for large British supermarket chains. Among them, the famous sausages with which many Britons start the day. But it also affected generic drugs that the National Health Service (NHS) moves between territories and a whole range of food and products for daily consumption.
The European Commission has wanted to ease tensions from the beginning. He looked the other way when, on up to three occasions, the Johnson government unilaterally extended the application of the controls that the protocol required it to apply. And in its offer this week, after Commission Vice-President in charge of negotiating with London, Maros Sefcovic, traveled to Northern Ireland to hear business complaints in person, the European Union proposed to cut by up to 80% bureaucratic and customs obstacles. But by that time Frost, who barely hides the ideological fanaticism behind his teddy bear face and gentle manners, had already preemptively emptied his expectations. He asked for something impossible, that the Court of Justice of the EU, the institution on which the rules of the internal market revolve, remove the hands of Northern Ireland. It is about “sovereignty” and “democratic principles,” the Conservative government warned. A ‘foreign’ court cannot be allowed to impose jurisdiction on British soil, Johnson’s team now says. The alarms have soared in Brussels, which is already preparing harsh reprisals for the possible violation of protocol.
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‘There is a strong feeling in Northern Ireland that [Johnson] it is simply using this territory to further its narrow political goals, “says Colin Harvey, professor of international humanitarian law at Queen’s University in Belfast.” And what you’re getting is that more and more people here are beginning to seriously consider the constitutional future and consider the idea of a united Ireland, ”predicts the scholar.
Northern Ireland’s unionist parties, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), fear that overtaking demographic and political, not only from republican formations such as Sinn Féin, but from the sum of moderate and focused options such as the Northern Ireland Alliance Party (Alliance). That is why they denounced the “betrayal” of the protocol from the beginning and now ask for its annihilation. The sectarian violence on the streets of Belfast and Derry in early July, especially in Protestant neighborhoods, was a reminder of the tension of recent years. The vandalism was the result of young radicals, overwhelmed by the confinement of the pandemic and largely agitated by paramilitary organizations, but political parties grave they took advantage of the stirred water to pressurize. Jeffrey Donaldson, the new leader of the DUP, has even threatened to blow up the shared institutions of local government that created the Belfast agreement and to destabilize the region again if the protocol signed with the EU does not disappear.
Like the Gallic people of Asterix, only a handful of moderate conservatives express their scandal that the British government is not meeting its international commitments. “For any solution to be possible, there must be a willingness to compromise on both sides,” wrote David Lidington, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (equivalent to the Ministry of the Presidency in Spain) in the previous government of Theresa May. “The United Kingdom must accept everything that the Northern Ireland Protocol implies, which was negotiated by the Boris Johnson government and supported by the Conservative Party in the 2019 electoral program, with which it won the elections,” said Lidington. This civil servant belongs to the last generation of conservatives who firmly believed that agreements are to be kept (agreements are honored), that the UK’s international credibility is an untouchable legacy and that the party’s electoral program is, in fact, a contract with the electorate.
“All states skip international law every week. The verbiage that presents him as the epitome of morality is simply typical of mediocre students of politics, “wrote Dominic Cummings, who was Johnson’s top adviser and Brexit ideologue before he left, in a barrage of unbridled tweets this week. Downing Street to the back door. Openly acknowledging that the government signed the agreements with the EU without the will to fully respect them, simply to speed up Brexit ahead of the 2019 general elections, Cummings revealed his former boss’s strategy. Johnson will always put in the drawer the possibility of a new confrontation with the EU, as a deceptive maneuver and a scapegoat whenever domestic problems, as now happens with the empty shelves of supermarkets or gas stations without fuel, accumulate.
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