Why is the Northern Ireland protocol still an issue? Actions have consequences

[Celerity]

Someone tell Boris Johnson: you can’t bake your ‘oven-ready deal’ and then remove a key ingredient (even if it’s a sausage)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/23/northern-ireland-protocol-boris-johnson-oven-ready-deal-sausage



Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer. The Northern Ireland protocol is a stupid answer: it imposes a complex bureaucracy on the movement of ordinary goods across the Irish Sea. But it is the only possible response to a problem created by Boris Johnson. The reason it keeps coming around again and again, like a ghoul on a ghost train, is that it requires Johnson and his government to do something that goes against the grain of the whole Brexit project: to acknowledge that choices have costs.

There used to be a gameshow on American radio and TV called Truth or Consequences. It was so popular that a whole city in New Mexico is named after it. It’s where we live now. In each episode, the contestant was asked a deliberately daft question – and when they failed to answer it, they had to perform a zany or embarrassing stunt.

We’ve reached that point in the Brexit show. The question is: why did you divide one part of the UK from the rest, creating a chimerical country in which most of the body is outside the EU’s single market while one foot is still inside? Since it is unanswerable, we get the embarrassing stunt: the demand that the EU should tear up a crucial part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement – or else.

Or else what? Britain will unilaterally suspend the operation of the protocol, force-feed the people of Northern Ireland with good English sausage, trigger retaliatory trade sanctions from the EU, destroy Britain’s reputation as a trustworthy partner for any sane country and deeply antagonise the Biden administration in Washington with whom it is hoping to do a landmark trade deal. Good luck with all that.

snip

[Soph0571]

1. They have backed themselves into a self owned corner

They have risked breaking up the Union for the whims of right wing English nationalists who could not give a shit about NI.

[Celerity]

2. BREXIT & COVID, two seemingly never-ending shitshows, and the bellend that is BoJo is at the wheel

of the clown car.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Chris Grey's commentary points out they were planning to break the agreement in Feb 2020

so none of this "unforeseen consequences" BS is true - pretty much as soon as the ink was dry, they intended to fuck around:

Not only are all these claims bogus, they are also irrelevant. Even if it were true that the government agreed the NIP unwillingly, because of the nature of the 2017-19 parliament, it remains the case that it signed up to it as part of an international treaty. Would Brexiters accept it if the EU were now to say that it had agreed only because of its internal politics and wanted to be let off its commitments now? Equally, even if it were true that the consequences are unexpected, the principle of pacta sunt servanda means that the UK (like the EU) is bound by the agreements it makes.

But, of course, neither of these things is true. The NIP happened because Johnson wanted to proclaim he had ‘done the deal’ and ‘got rid of the hated backstop’ so that Britain could have no further delays to reaching, ahem, ‘freedom day’ from the EU. On this basis he won the 2019 election and rammed the legislation through parliament, with almost no discussion, prior to signing the deal. Yet within literally weeks of doing so he and Frost were discovered to be working on plans to circumvent the provisions of the NIP (£), long before any implementation had even occurred and therefore before any ‘unexpected’ consequences could have arisen.

None of this would be guessed from this week’s government proposals. Without even a hint of contrition for his prior decisions – he, after all, negotiated the NIP - Frost now shamelessly recycles various versions of ideas that were repeatedly discussed and rejected prior to the 2019 agreement. These include a revival of the ‘honesty box’ idea in place of customs checks, a Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary (SPS) ‘dual regulatory’ system, and the removal of the ECJ’s role in governance. These suggestions are not explained in any great detail, but in many ways they quite closely resemble the proposals made in October 2019, and rejected by the EU, before Johnson’s ‘walk in the park’ with Leo Varadkar.

In other words, as per my recent blog post, the government continues to go around the same Mobius Strip of trying to square contradictory demands. It would be embarrassing were Frost capable of embarrassment, so he leaves that to the rest of us. The irreducible core, explicitly stated in the new document (Link to tweet
/photo/1" target="_blank">paragraph 4) is that the government, like all the Brexiter ideologues (£), does not in fact accept the need for the NIP at all. It comes close to an open admission of what is abundantly obvious: Johnson signed up to the NIP in bad faith.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-frost-johnson-approach-has-already.html

Bonus link to the Daily Mail having the truly moronic "Brexiter MP Graham Brady writing about how willingness to wear masks shows “how far a proud nation has allowed itself to fall” is a reminder that windy rhetoric and bogus patriotism are amongst the common threads linking lockdown scepticism and Brexity outrage" (an article that, if written on Twitter or Facebook, might get him suspended for lying about Covid).

[Celerity]

4. +1