Quixote's Protocol
If you didn’t know any better then you would think that the Northern Ireland Protocol was forced on the government of Boris Johnson. Of course that is far from the case. The prime minister rejected the proposal by his predecessor, Theresa May, and then won an election on the basis of his oven-ready Brexit deal.
Now, only a few years later, we are being told how awful the Protocol is and why it should be scrapped in favour of something more beneficial to the UK.
In a legal sense, ‘triggering Article 16’ is nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds. It simply commences a rather bureaucratic process whereby the two sides attempt to negotiate a resolution. The problem is that the UK is not entering the negotiations with anything approaching good faith.
Johnson is now proposing new domestic legislation that would overwrite parts of the Brexit deal. This is a direct threat to any sort of reasonable compromise and shows the weakness of the UK’s negotiating position by placing a finger over the nuclear option before the two sides even sit down.
The absurd thing is that there are very few people on the UK side who support this hostile position. More people in Northern Ireland favour the Protocol than oppose it. Almost two-thirds of respondents to that survey also said that the agreement presents Northern Ireland with “a unique set of post-Brexit economic opportunities compared to the rest of the UK”.
That point of view is matched by the business community in Northern Ireland as well. Their working group is still hopeful that a deal can be negotiated between the two sides and they are concerned at the aggressive posturing of the prime minister. Ministers are failing to engage with this group and that only strengthens the notion that this is more about politics than economics.
Even members of Johnson’s own Conservative party balk at the prospect of new legislation that would re-write the Brexit deal and potentially spark a trade war. Dozens of MPs have reportedly said that they would vote against the move that would also threaten peace in the region.
It is likely that the prime minister knows this and it is all just a scare tactic but this sort of approach will not be looked upon kindly in Ireland or the rest of the EU. To the rest of the world it just looks like Johnson is banging away at a war drum, rattling his sabre at a delicate problem, and attacking an enemy of his own making.
This week in the podcast we have another tax case that had the potential to cost taxpayers around £1 billion.
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/2022-uksc-12/
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