Member-only story
Brexit Is Broken. Here’s How To Fix It.
The Northern Ireland Protocol in the Brexit deal is causing shortages and violence in the region. Here’s how it can be fixed.
Every version of the world where the UK left the EU is worse than every version of the world where the UK remained in the EU.
The UK could either have had true independence to make its own trade deals, meaning huge economic loss, disruption to supply chains, and trouble in Northern Ireland, or left the EU but not its regulatory institutions, causing little real damage but leaving the UK without a vote on laws which affect it.
The UK and EU went for the former: they have regulatory disalignment as a result of the Withdrawal Agreement and the trade deal agreed on Christmas Eve 2020. But that means that there has to be a hard border between the EU and the UK. Given that the Republic of Ireland is in the EU and attached by a land border to Northern Ireland, this in turn means that there had to be a border either in the Irish Sea, or on the island of Ireland.
The government opted for the border in the Irish Sea, upsetting unionist communities by effectively pushing Northern Ireland closer to the Republic of Ireland in regulatory terms. Politically, though, Northern Ireland remains very much so the…
