The Northern Ireland Protocol paradox - or, why can’t Boris Johnson supporters spot the obvious?
The sabre rattling nonsense of the UK government threatening to invoke Article 16 of the NI Protocol embarrassingly refuses to die. It doesn’t matter that the jig was up when the US intervened, causing a mini-Suez no one in the political media took real notice of. This is just an indelible part of the Brexit script, so Frost, BJ, and all the rest of them along for the ride have to pretend like the Tories might decide to commit political suicide if they don’t get their way on something the vast majority of people in England, which is where they need to hang onto seats next election time, do not give the slightest crap about.
What’s more interesting about all of this to me remains the popularity of Boris Johnson amongst Brexiteers. It is deeply strange when you try and look at it as objectively as possible. Johnson agreed the Withdrawal Agreement and the NI Protocol. They are his babies. He even ran an entire general election campaign around promising to implement it all. But now, Brexiteers have cottoned onto the fact that the whole thing is a dud, at least from their perspective. They don’t like the Withdrawal Agreement or the Protocol that sits within it, this much is certain.
It seems to me that if you’re a Brexiteer, you can only come to one of two logical conclusions. The first is that Brexit could have been great - we really did hold all the cards - but Boris Johnson screwed it all up. The other is you cling to your love of Johnson while admitting that Brexit had a lot of downsides to it - and maybe, just maybe, was always a terrible idea. In other words, you can believe in “Brexit good, Boris bad” or “Boris good, Brexit bad”, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to logically think that “Brexit good, Boris good”.
But people aren’t logical and so there is a fudge involved in this conundrum. It wasn’t Boris Johnson’s fault, you see. Theresa May is to blame for getting us into such a pickle with the EU in the first place. We were in a strong position when she moved into Number 10 and then she screwed it all up. It’s all her fault - Boris has just been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.
This requires some massive mental gymnastics and indeed, some outright lie swallowing in order to believe. For a start, Theresa May wanted to do the very opposite of the NI Protocol. She said no British Prime Minister should ever put a customs border down the Irish Sea - and for what it’s worth, Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary, openly agreed - and she meant it. When Johnson became PM, it was his idea to put the customs border down the Irish Sea, or at least, he was the one who said yes to it.
Ah, Brexiteers will say here, he only did that because he had so little time left. This is a myth - he had as much time as he wanted. The EU didn’t have a ticking clock, it was the UK that installed all of these deadlines artificially for the sole purpose of keeping the ERG happy. There were any number of things Boris Johnson could have done. He could have ripped up May’s idea of having a rather crappy version of Brexit - on that at least, I agree with him and the ERG - and instead aim for an arrangement like Switzerland. That, of course, would have taken time and for Johnson to level with the country that Brexit will be complicated and involve difficult choices. He didn’t do that - he clearly decided instead to get it over with as quickly as possible, agreeing to the NI Protocol and to what amounts to a lousy, thin trade deal in order to try and put the whole thing behind him.
Which wouldn’t be as egregious as it is if only he was willing to stick with the consequences of his actions. But he clearly is not and looks like he is constantly searching for scapegoats upon which to foist the blame for problems he himself has created. It is amazing that his loyal fans can’t see this. But again, human beings aren’t logical creatures. We see what we want to see a lot of the time.
The coming ETIAS
If you thought travelling to the continent post-Brexit was a pain in the arse already, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. By the end of next year, you’ll need to pay a fee and fill out a bunch of online forms beforehand in order to get into the EU. It’s all part of ETIAS, the European Travel Information and Authorisation System. You probably won’t have heard of this before, because when the UK was in the EU, we didn’t need to worry about this sort of thing.
But, as a third country, British citizens will now have to go through all of this whenever they want to go to France, or Spain, or Italy, or well, anywhere remotely close by. My question here is, how long will it take for the penny to drop for your average Briton? I mean, look, I know there are a lot of Brexiteers who aren’t keen on immigration. They might try and make an argument that sure, travelling abroad is a lot harder now but at least we’ve stopped all that immigration dead, right? Except, the dinghies are still coming over and isn’t that what those chaps really care about? Was the immigration worry really centred on stopping entrepreneurial young French people coming here and starting businesses? Which means, as usual, Brexit mostly just seemed to be about shooting ourselves in the collective foot. How long will it take for your average punter to catch on? Time will tell.
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coming to this one late, but from Chris Grey's columns I've read quite a lot in there about how Johnson was getting people to back the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol specifically by telling the ERG types that he didn't intend to actually apply the agreed terms and that it could all be renegotiated or ignored after it had been passed. So it's not only the case that he agreed to the NIP purely to get over his immediate problem of being able to go into the 2019 election with a "Get Brexit Done" slogan, but that even at the very time he was pushing the WA as the touted "Oven Ready Deal" he was winking at the Brexit Ultras that they didn't really *mean* any of this stuff right from the start.