In the early hours of Monday, October 4, David Frost, Boris Johnson’s man for the negotiations with Brussels, proclaimed to a capacity half full of Conservative Party militants that “the long nightmare of EU membership had ended and was already beginning. the British Renaissance ”. Those summoned to the annual congress of political formation, in Manchester, barely stretched out while the speaker on the rostrum, quoted, without naming him, the “great national poet” who symbolized like no one the idea of Empire and colonial domination: “And of soon, all the men wake up to the sound of shackles breaking, and each one smiles at his neighbor to tell him that he is the owner of his own soul ”. Frost recited Rudyard Kipling, implicitly confirming in his words that Brexit was, and still is, a nostalgic ideological weapon rather than the practical solution to a painful divorce.
London and Brussels are a few steps away from plunging down the ravine and unleashing a trade war that neither interests them, because the Johnson government has decided that the commitments it signed at the time are no longer valid. It calls for drastic changes to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the most delicate and costly piece in a long negotiation process to complete the UK’s exit from the EU. And more or less extensive adjustments that alleviate the bureaucratic obstacles that the protocol has caused to employers are not enough. Downing Street now wants the cornerstone of that agreement, its oversight by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), to disappear. “The role of the CJEU in relation to the protocol never worried anyone … Until it became clear that the specific problems could be solved in a practical way and the British Government was left without casus belli”, Assures EL PAÍS Fintan O’Toole, the Irish writer and political analyst who has most skillfully penetrated the nature and character of Johnson. “Instead of claiming victory, accepting the EU’s generous offer and lowering the tension in Northern Ireland, they prefer to invent a new impossible demand to blame Brussels when it rejects it,” O’Toole accuses.
With Brexit, as with any labyrinth, it is convenient to pull the thread so as not to lose sight of where the mess began. By leaving the community club, the Republic of Ireland would become the only land border between the UK and the EU. Brussels sought at all costs, during the exit negotiations, to preserve its most precious treasure: the internal market, which groups the economic and commercial exchanges of 27 countries under the same rules. However, a second factor came into play in the talks, perhaps without much financial weight, but which required extreme delicacy. The 1998 Good Friday Peace Accords, which ended decades of terrorist and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, imposed a practical and imaginative solution. The border between the two Irlandes became invisible. Any citizen could move from one side to the other without detecting the slightest sign of separation, beyond the fact that the coffee or the pint of beer had to be paid in euros or pounds sterling. The imposition of customs controls with the arrival of Brexit, however discreet they were, posed the risk of awakening ghosts that were still latent.
The solution chosen by London and Brussels was for Northern Ireland to remain part of the EU internal market and to abide by its rules. The new one border, for customs and health supervision of goods, would be placed in the Irish Sea, which separates the two islands. Johnson delightedly signed a pact that allowed him to present himself to his people as the politician who had finally made Brexit a reality. The truth, however, is always stubborn. And when the conservative politician has begun to criticize the Northern Ireland Protocol, to the point of blaming the text for even threatening peace in the region, allies and rivals have reminded him that that commitment was a farce from the beginning. “Johnson told me, personally, that once they had signed the Protocol, they were going to change it,” Northern Irish unionist deputy Ian Paisley Jr., the son of the historic and visceral Reverend Paisley, confessed to the BBC this week. “In fact, he assured me that they were going to break it into a thousand pieces. They signed it as a last minute shortcut, but the problem is that it has already cost Northern Irish businessmen almost 180 million euros, and we cannot afford it, “said Paisley.
The sanitary and customs controls imposed by the new treaty have caused extraordinary expenses and administrative obstacles to the trade that flows from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. It was the so-called “sausage war” between London and Brussels, because much of this reinforcement in supervision affected meat products destined for the large British supermarket chains. Among them, the famous sausages with which many English people start the day. But it also affected generic drugs that the National Health Service (NHS) moves between territories and a whole range of food and daily consumption products.
The European Commission has wanted from the outset to ease tensions. He has looked the other way when, up to three times, the Johnson government has unilaterally extended the entry into force of the controls that the protocol required it to apply. And in its offer this week, after the Vice-President of the Commission and in charge of negotiating with London, Maros Sefcovic, traveled to Northern Ireland to hear in person the complaints of the businessmen, the European Union has proposed to reduce up to in 80% of bureaucratic and customs obstacles. But by then, Frost, who behind his teddy bear face and gentle manner barely hides an ideological fanaticism, had already preemptively emptied expectations. It demanded something impossible, that the Court of Justice of the EU, the institution on which the rules of the internal market pivot, remove its hands from Northern Ireland. It is a question of “sovereignty” and “democratic principles”, the conservative government warned. A “foreign” court cannot be allowed to impose jurisdiction on British soil, Johnson’s team now claims. The alarms have gone off in Brussels, which is already preparing harsh retaliation in response to the possible breach of the protocol.
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“There is a strong feeling in Northern Ireland that [Johnson] it is simply using this territory to advance its narrow political goals, ”says Colin Harvey, Professor of International Humanitarian Law at Queen’s University in Belfast. “And what he is achieving is that more and more people here begin to seriously consider the constitutional future and consider the idea of a united Ireland,” predicts the academic.
Northern Ireland’s unionist parties, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), fear that sorpasso demographic and political, not only by republican formations like Sinn Féin, but by the sum of moderate and focused options like the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (Alliance). That is why they denounced the “betrayal” of the protocol from the outset, and are now demanding its annihilation. The sectarian violence on the streets of Belfast and Derry in early July, especially in Protestant neighborhoods, recalled the tension of years past. The vandalism was the result of young radicals, burdened by the confinement of the pandemic and largely agitated by paramilitary organizations, but the political parties serious they took advantage of the churning water to put pressure. Jeffrey Donaldson, the new leader of the DUP, has even threatened to burst the shared institutions of the Home Rule Government that created the Belfast Agreement and to destabilize the region again if the protocol signed with the EU does not disappear.
Like the Gallic village of Asterix, only a handful of moderate conservatives express their scandal over the fact that the British Government fails to fulfill its international commitments. “For any solution to be possible, a willingness to compromise on both sides is required,” wrote David Lidington, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (equivalent to the Ministry of the Presidency in Spain) in the previous Government of Theresa May. “The United Kingdom must accept everything that the Northern Ireland Protocol implies, which was negotiated by the Government of Boris Johnson, and supported by the Conservative Party in the 2019 electoral program, with which it won the elections,” claimed Lidington. This public servant belongs to the last generation of conservatives who firmly believed that pacta sunt servanda (agreements are honored), that the UK’s international credibility is an untouchable heritage and that the party’s electoral program is really a contract with the electorate.
“All states skip international law every week. The verbiage that presents him as the epitome of morality is simply typical of mediocre Politics students, ”wrote this week in an avalanche of rampant tweets Dominic Cummings, who was Johnson’s star adviser and Brexit ideologue before leaving Downing Street for the back door. By openly acknowledging that the government signed the agreements with the EU without willingness to comply with them in their entirety, simply to accelerate Brexit before the 2019 general elections, Cummings has unveiled the strategy of his former boss. As he has made it just as clear that Johnson will always keep in the drawer the possibility of a new confrontation with the EU, as a misleading maneuver and a scapegoat whenever domestic problems, as is now the case with empty shelves in supermarkets or gas stations. without fuel, they will accumulate.
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