Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, every prime minister has had to grapple with the conundrum of the Irish border. How can Brexit be delivered, while protecting Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom and avoiding a land border with the EU?
The hope is that the DUP will refrain from coming out against a Sunak deal even if they fail to endorse it
Theresa May tried to solve the dilemma with the Chequers agreement, which would have kept the whole of the UK in an effective customs union with Brussels. It ended her premiership. Boris Johnson opted to let Great Britain differ from EU rules, which excluded Northern Ireland and created a de facto border in the Irish sea. After initiallypromising there would be no checks on goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, Johnson introduced legislation to allow the UK to unilaterally override parts of the protocol to which his government had signed up. The EU retaliated with threats of a trade war. Things haven’t moved on much.
Now Rishi Sunak hopes to agree a new arrangement with Brussels to reduce friction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. By some Whitehall estimates, 20 per cent of customs checked on the EU’s ‘external borders’ are on goods heading from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. As things stand, not a single unionist elected to Stormont backs the protocol, which raises the difficult issue of democratic consent. How can the government come up with a solution that the DUP will support?
The rebellion against Sunak’s plan started before anyone knew what it was. Sunak’s prime- ministerial predecessors are seeing red. A source close to Johnson has warned Sunak not to abandon the protocol bill, which is now on pause in the House of Lords. Liz Truss could be next – I understand that, as the minister who worked on the bill as foreign secretary, she is unlikely to back any deal that she believes to be less satisfactory than the protocol bill.
Will such interventions lead to a wider Tory rebellion? There are plenty of MPs who just want the situation resolved. One of Johnson’s former backers complains that Johnson and Truss ought to give Sunak the space to govern. But others are ready to rebel. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has returned to the back benches, has accused the PM of falling into the Theresa May trap – negotiating details without ensuring unionists and Tory Brexit-eers are on board. No vote is required on a new deal, but Sunak has indicated there will be one. Labour have offered to bail him out if he can’t get the deal past his own party, but that would be a big admission of weakness.
‘It’s turning into a referendum on Rishi,’ warns a senior Tory. ‘All the factions that don’t like him are using it as a stick to beat him with.’ None of this should come as a particular surprise to Sunak. Some of his supporters think it is a mistake to try to seek a compromise. ‘Unless you have the DUP onside, don’t bother,’ says one.
In government, the hope is that the DUP – who are yet to see a final draft – will refrain from coming out against a Sunak deal even if they fail to offer a ringing endorsement. This could offer a path, albeit a narrow one, to restoring the suspended assembly at Stormont. The current expectation is that the deal will involve a limited role for the European Court of Justice, only if invoked in Belfast.
But the unionists could be hard to convince. While the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson praised Sunak’s ‘progress’ when he addressed a meeting of the European Research Group, he said there was some way to go before DUP MPs could back an agreement. If they don’t, there is little hope of assuaging Tory rebels. Brexiteer Tories are concerned that Steve Baker, a Brexit hard-liner and a Northern Ireland minister, has been largely left out of the loop. There are rumours he will resign from government once he finds out what’s in the proposals.
Sunak’s problem is there is no neat solution to the issue of the protocol, as Johnson found out. Even if the protocol bill becomes law, the EU can still sue the UK over breaches in an international court. If the protocol bill passes the Lords, we could see a fight between the upper and lower house as peers add tricky amendments. ‘It would be back to Brexit wars,’ says one Tory MP. One-nation Tory MPs could refuse to vote to remove amendments – Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, is already arguing that the protocol bill is no longer legal. Tory splits could once again dominate the news.
A recent poll by Matthew Goodwin found that Labour has a slender lead on the question of which party is best placed to handle Brexit, at 17 to 16, while 52 per cent don’t know. The Conservatives were elected in 2019 on a promise to Get Brexit Done, but how can the government claim to have achieved that when Northern Ireland’s assembly is still suspended? There is also the worry that the failure to make Brexit work will pave the way for a future Labour government to move to a softer Brexit entirely. Keir Starmer has said that a ‘closer trading relationship’ would do a lot to ‘improve our economy’.
At cabinet this week, Sunak tried to assure his own ministers of his solidity on the issue. He described himself as a Conservative, Brexiteer and unionist, and told ministers that ‘all three parts of me need to be happy’ to proceed on a deal. Sunak was backed by the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who said that 10,000 jobs were at stake if the checks issues were not quickly resolved.
Sunak is trying to be more collaborative than his combative predecessors in shoring up the Union. He believes that when he blocked the Scottish parliament’s gender self-ID plan it was a success because the legal grounding was there and he kept the argument about the Union rather than culture wars. He hopes this approach will help with Brexit too. But any miscalculation would put him in tricky territory. Next month’s Budget is likely to disappoint low-tax Tories, and the party is facing a shellacking in May’s local elections. ‘It’s not so much about ousting another leader as looking like we simply cannot govern,’ says a senior Tory. As Sunak tries to succeed where others have failed on Brexit, he risks succumbing to the same fate as those who went before him.
Politics / Sunak’s Brexit gamble
6
1
23.02.2023
Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, every prime minister has had to grapple with the conundrum of the Irish border. How can Brexit be delivered, while protecting Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom and avoiding a land border with the EU?
The hope is that the DUP will refrain from coming out against a Sunak deal even if they fail to endorse it
Theresa May tried to solve the dilemma with the Chequers agreement, which would have kept the whole of the UK in an effective customs union with Brussels. It ended her premiership. Boris Johnson opted to let Great Britain differ from EU rules, which excluded Northern Ireland and created a de facto border in the Irish sea. After initiallypromising there would be no checks on goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, Johnson introduced legislation to allow the UK to unilaterally override parts of the protocol to which his government had signed up. The EU retaliated with threats of a trade war. Things haven’t moved on much.
Now Rishi Sunak hopes to agree a new arrangement with Brussels to reduce friction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. By some Whitehall estimates, 20 per cent of customs checked on the EU’s ‘external borders’ are on goods heading from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. As things stand, not a single unionist elected to Stormont backs the protocol, which raises the difficult issue of democratic consent. How can the government come up with a solution that the DUP will support?
The rebellion against Sunak’s plan started before anyone knew what it........
© The Spectator
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