The briefing has started. According to reports both from Bloomberg and the Financial Times, London and Brussels think they’re closing in on some sort of deal over the Northern Irish Protocol.
Whether or not an actual workable deal will emerge from all of this, however, is an open question, because it doesn’t sound as though they’ve actually quite solved the really thorny issues, such as the role of the European Court of Justice, quite yet.
Here’s Bloomberg quoting some “people familiar with the matter”:
“While details are close to being ironed out, there are still differences to be resolved at a political level, particularly on governance, they said. One of the people cautioned that the remaining challenges were politically the most complicated to sort out.
“Nevertheless, progress could be sufficient for announcements to be made in the next 10 days before a final push, they said.”
Well.
On Tuesday, our editor suggested that Rishi Sunak might try and settle for “a few technical tweaks to customs processes” whilst kicking the constitutional can down the road. That the two sides might actually start announcing things before making a “final push” on the governance issues seems to accord with that analysis.
It also accords with the concerns of some of those involved on the government side that the Prime Minister is too inclined to approach issues with a Treasury mindset.
It will certainly do nothing to reassure either the European Research Group or the Democratic Unionists; nor will the language about governance being a problem on “a political level”, rather than a structural or constitutional one.
The timeline, meanwhile, reflects what we noted back in November: that despite the official line about the unhelpfulness of deadlines – and the Northern Ireland Office’s generally abject track record with them – there is one here.
April is the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, and both sides want Stormont back on its feet so the piteous state of the Province’s institutions doesn’t spoil the big day.
Joe Biden, in particular, is leaning on both sides to sort it out so he can visit and have a moment for the Democrats’ Irish American voters, and presidential visits are opportunities for British politicians to feel important. For a deal to arrive in time to get the Assembly going by April, it would apparently need to arrive by mid-February. And lo.
Yet if this is the reasoning, there is an obvious flaw in it. The Assembly is out of action because the DUP refuse to enter it, because of the sea border and the governance issues arising from the Protocol. If whatever deal emerges doesn’t satisfy them on those points, they won’t re-enter the Assembly. No big day, no Biden.
(This is why Government sources have previously told this site it was generally accepted that there was no point spending political capital trying to deliver a deal the DUP won’t accept.)
So we’re presented with a bit of a puzzle: a deal apparently ploughing ahead without a resolution on governance issues, in order to meet a deadline which is irrelevant if said governance issues aren’t resolved.
If that is the case, a couple of possible explanations suggest themselves. The first is that the “final push”, with its rolling drumbeat of positive announcements in the looming shadow of the centenary, is supposed to put pressure on the DUP to fold, perhaps in the hope that if sufficient progress is made on the sea border they might prove less preoccupied than the ERG with high constitutional issues such as the precise role of the European Court of Justice.
But this seems… unlikely? Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, their leader, is under no political pressure to make London, Brussels, or Washington happy.
As for the voters he actually cares about, on Friday polling for the Belfast Telegraph found that only 21 per cent of unionist voters (and not his 21 per cent, you can be sure) think the party should re-enter devolved government without a resolution on the Protocol.
(It also found that only a third of unionists would vote for the Belfast Agreement today, which puts the common claim that the Protocol safeguards it in an interesting perspective.)
DUP sources are especially scathing about the idea that the fate of the President’s visit might sway them; had Biden wanted them to be more enthusiastic, he might not have appointed a self-declared Irish Republican as his Special Envoy to Northern Ireland.
Donaldson will, as our editor pointed out, be acutely aware of the historic doom that awaits unionist leaders who trade concrete positions for warm words from London and Washington. He must also know that his veto over Stormont is the only thing preventing a deal being struck over the heads of the unionists (again), and that he will very likely only get to cash that bargaining chip in once.
Nor does Donaldson seem to be preparing for any sort of break with the ERG, his only parliamentary allies, having addressed the Group’s MPs earlier this month.
Another, more intriguing option is that there is a deal on the governance issues, but it’s being kept under wraps to prevent it getting shot to pieces before it can be sold to whoever needs to buy it. Bloomberg again: “How to communicate and package the progress made on the various arrangements is among the negotiators’ considerations”.
But if a workable deal is being hidden then it is being very well hidden. Here’s a choice quote from the FT:
“Under the terms of the deal, Northern Ireland will follow EU rules for goods, VAT and state aid policy, which both Conservative Brexiters and the Democratic Unionist party in Northern Ireland have said impinged unacceptably on UK sovereignty.”
Moreover, with EU rules comes ECJ oversight. ERG told this site in October that they would not let the Government “park the issue of ECJ authority”. Senior sources have since indicated that it might endorse a truly independent arbitration mechanism, but not one linked to the Court. This does not, if the briefing to the FT is any indication, sound like that sort of deal.
It is of course possible that two groups of people negotiating under intense pressure, in a tunnel that has neither the DUP nor the ERG in it, have arrived at some sort of arcane fix and convinced themselves that it must be saleable because they’ve worked so hard on it. It happened to David Cameron.
But the Protocol problem has already consumed vast amounts of time and energy from very able people who would rather have been doing other things. If cleverness alone could square the circle, it would have been squared by now.
If the Government has managed to persuade Brussels to accept a deal that will satisfy the DUP and get devolution in Belfast propped up again by April, that would be a remarkable achievement, not to mention something of break with its record on Northern Ireland. But don’t believe it until you see it.
Source link
#rushed #Protocol #deal #sidestep #Democratic #Unionists #fail #Conservative #Home