This week in Brexitland, June 17, 2022

1. The NI Protocol Bill finally lands - and predictably, it’s very bad news for everyone, including the government that created it

As expected, the UK government has finally put forward a bill to the House of Commons that will render crucial elements of the NI Protocol null and void for all practical purposes. Somewhat predictably as well, this week saw them giving out the message that this was nothing more than a set of minor adjustments that the EU would be churlish to complain about, much less retaliate against. To say this has been them painting a false picture would be to greatly understate the issue.

This is a huge move which will have repercussions that will potentially last for decades. In terms of pissing off both the Americans and the EU, the two largest forces in western politics at present, it would be difficult to think something worse they could have done short of giving the Russians military aid.

Beyond even all of that are the deeper issues around this move, both for the country and the Conservative party itself. One involves democratic legitimacy; how Brexit relates to democracy in the UK and what is being unwound here. A constant gripe of Brexiters from June 2016 through until the present day is that Remainers were being anti-democratic; that in attempting to deny the result of the referendum, they were demonstrating that they only care about democratic legitimacy when plebiscites provide them with a result they personally like.

However, everything this Vote Leave government is doing around the NI Protocol shows that they themselves only care about democracy when it suits them. One of the most important parts of the NI Protocol was that it could only continue to be in place so long as the people of Northern Ireland, expressed through the will of Stormont, approved of doing so, with votes scheduled at regular intervals on the topic. The bill the government have introduced rides roughshod over this plan.

Very recently, there was an election in Northern Ireland and it produced a majority for parties wanting to stick with the Protocol, at least for the time being. Had Stormont been allowed to convene and taken a vote on the Protocol, this could have been confirmed. However, that cannot take place since the DUP refuse to take their seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Tories have essentially sided with them, saying their minority voice trumps the majority that does not want the NI Protocol replaced with either a border on the island of Ireland or something unspecified and unknowable.

That’s before we get to the wider issue of democratic legitimacy that is being thrown to the wind here. The Tories ran the last general election on a platform of implementing the Withdrawal Agreement, within which the NI Protocol was an essential part. By essentially disapplying the Protocol, aren’t the Tories committing the granddaddy of all manifesto pledge breaks here?

Given Labour’s reticence to talk about the subject for understandable political reasons, combined with public burnout across most of the British population, the way to “bed in Brexit” so that it was unlikely to ever be reversed was to find a stable resting point for it all and never, ever talk about it again. Yet this is the thing that Brexiters cannot seem to do - they constantly want to pick at it in ways that are unhelpful to their project long term. They don’t understand that they are laying the groundwork for an argument that goes like this: painful as it is to talk about Brexit again, it seems like finding a place where our post-Brexit settlement works for Britain is extremely difficult to find. Perhaps at least rejoining some of the EU institutions isn’t a bad idea if it means we finally can stop talking about all of this and move on at long last. The Tories never seem to understand that the vast public are a). not actually all that interested in Brexit one way or another and certainly don’t hold the idea of it sacred in any way and b). really don’t want the low tax, little to no public services libertarian utopia that most of them think is the only landing point that will mean Brexit is truly “done”. Such a thing would be deeply unpopular, in fact, and if the Conservatives ran the next general election promising such a thing, they would be totally crushed.

In the meantime, we have to suffer with watching people who insisted that Brexit was a great idea whither in the face of Brexit’s predictable terribleness, all while telling us that the reason it’s all gone pear-shaped is because the Brexit they themselves foisted upon us is in some way deficient in ways they cannot quite define. One day soon, this phase of British history will be over, which is all you can cling to these days.

2. The DUP are given an ultimatum

I sort of wondered why this story, which broke on Wednesday, wasn’t bigger. But then I remembered that no one in England really cares that much about Northern Irish politics, and only do so to the extent that it informs Westminster politics. But this one is revealing of much of the latter and should have been covered more widely as a result.

In amongst all of the weirdness surrounding the NI Protocol Bill, the government have issued the DUP with an ultimatum: either commit to taking their seats in the Assembly, allowing it to function under power sharing rules, or they won’t take Northern Ireland Protocol Bill any further within the House of Commons. This is strange for several reasons.

One is that government figures are constantly on the media briefing about how intolerable living under the conditions imposed by the NI Protocol are for the people of Northern Ireland and that the amendments to it they wish to unilaterally take are absolutely necessary. How then does that square with this threat to the DUP? Is the bill absolutely vital to national interests or not? If you threaten to withdraw something simply because a third party won’t do something specific you’d like them to do, it sort of suggests that the thing you’d be willing to withdraw isn’t that vital after all.

Just consider all of the madness at play here. The UK government will not take forward plans to do something they are telling everyone is absolutely necessary unless the party that came second in recent Northern Irish elections agrees to take their seats in the Assembly so that it can function. All so that the Northern Ireland Assembly can then inevitably demonstrate that it is pro-Protocol, given the make up of seats in it. What would the UK government do then? Live with the Protocol they said was a danger to peace in Northern Ireland because of the democratic will of the Northern Irish people? The amount of stuff that doesn’t make any sense here is terrifying.

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I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.