Owen Polley on why the Northern Ireland Protocol is bad for the Union
THE PROTOCOL IS INTENDED TO DIVIDE THE UK
Since the Northern Ireland Protocol was introduced at the start of the year, it has caused shortages of goods, problems with supply chains and extra costs for businesses and consumers. This tiny province of 1.8 million people now conducts one fifth of the total number of border checks on trade that take place across the entire EU.
Remember that this extraordinary barrier to trade affects goods travelling from one part of the UK to another. Companies in Great Britain complain that it is now easier and less expensive to send many categories of goods to France, rather than Northern Ireland. In some cases the paperwork is equivalent to sending products to the far ends of Asia.
So far, the Protocol has only been implemented in part and its effects could yet become much worse. A ‘grace period’ for supermarkets has kept food moving into Northern Ireland relatively freely. The major retailers warn that when this arrangement ceases, people here will have to pay substantially more to eat. Their products will have to be sourced in the EU rather than Great Britain.
A similarly temporary arrangement to keep medicines moving into Northern Ireland runs out at the end of 2021. Pharmaceutical companies say that they will stop supplying the province with some drugs at the end of this period. If this had happened at the start of 2021, it’s likely that it would not have been possible to roll-out the UK’s speedy vaccination programme against Covid-19, in Ulster.
Against this grim backdrop, you would expect an enormous outcry against the Protocol from across the political spectrum, as well as an acknowledgement from the EU that it is not working. Instead, the European Commission insists that the Irish Sea border, with all the misery and disruption it brings, is necessary to protect the ‘peace process’. Its stance is supported without equivocation by Irish nationalists, the Dublin government and pro-Brussels liberals, who want more ‘rigorous’ implementation of new checks and processes.
The EU argued originally that the Protocol was needed to protect its single market without creating checks or infrastructure on the island of Ireland. Its provisions were supposed to apply only to goods ‘at risk’ of entering the Republic or mainland Europe.
Unfortunately, practically any trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland was deemed, by default, to meet this ‘at risk’ criterion. The government argued, when it first signed the Protocol, that the ‘joint committee’ set up to oversee its operation would soon exempt most categories of goods.
We may never know why Boris Johnson and Co. expected an outbreak of reasonableness and pragmatism from Brussels, after three years of negotiations, during which the EU had made it quite clear that it wanted to impose a punitive Brexit deal on Britain. At best, this expectation was spectacularly naive.
The failure to exempt things like food moving straight to supermarkets, parcels travelling directly to consumers and medicines intended for NHS patients from ‘at risk’ status at least explodes any notion of good faith from Brussels. Not that you would know it from much of the commentary around the issue.
The Protocol is not designed to prevent products from entering the single market from Northern Ireland. It’s intended to put our province under the EU’s authority and dislodge it from the UK’s internal market and political influence. We are the price that Brussels is exacting for Brexit.
The high court in Belfast recently confirmed that the Protocol repealed critical sections of the Acts of Union 1800. These are the constitutional laws that underpin Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK.
The Irish Sea border is wreaking economic mayhem, but even more significantly, it is threatening to break up the United Kingdom. This is not an accidental side effect of Brexit, but the intention of the EU, who view it as a justifiable punishment. It’s also an astonishing piece of irresponsibility, given the passions it unleashes in a place that suffered decades of separatist terrorist violence.
If the government does not tackle the Protocol in this context, then it is failing to do its duty as a purported custodian of the British Union.
Owen Polley is a writer, commentator and policy consultant. Byline at Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Irish Times, Standpoint, CapX, Reaction, News Letter, The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, Belfast Telegraph, Irish News, FourFourTwo and other websites and magazines.
