The EU's desire to punish Britain is risking a no-deal Brexit
(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
The EU brokered a Withdrawal Agreement with the UK and it is not prepared to renegotiate the deal, now that Britain is refusing to stick to its side of the bargain.
Like many of the other apparent truisms we hear daily about Brexit and the backstop, this line from Brussels doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It might seem obvious – but clearly it needs to be repeated – we never actually made a deal with the EU.
Two teams of negotiators prepared a draft agreement that the British parliament then rejected in resounding fashion, inflicting the worst defeat on a government in the history of the House of Commons. If it is not reopened and changed, the ‘deal’ is dead; it simply no longer exists.
The draft agreement is unpopular for many reasons, but the Conservative and DUP MPs who were responsible for its routing at Westminster based their opposition primarily on the Northern Ireland backstop. The EU claims that this backstop cannot be removed, because it provides an insurance policy against new checks at the Irish land border, but this argument is unravelling so completely that it is becoming an insult to the intelligence of the British people.
Either there is a possibility of a harder frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic or there is not. The EU can’t quite get its story straight as to whether physical infrastructure will be needed at the border if no agreement is reached before the 29th of March. One day Michel Barnier claims that “there will be checks in case of no-deal”; the next he says, “we will have to find an operational way of carrying out controls without putting back in place a border.”
If the EU does require checks on goods in this scenario, then its refusal to drop the backstop will have been the cause of the ‘hard border’ that it was specifically supposed to prevent. If technology can be used to keep controls away from the border, so that goods continue to move relatively freely between Northern Ireland and the Republic, then no insurance policy was required in the first place.
Brussels can continue to insist upon its version of the backstop, even as the logic on which it was based crumbles to dust, but, with the obstinacy on display, you have to ask what its purpose was in the first place. Whether or not it was conceived for different reasons, the backstop is now both a symbol and a punishment.
It’s a symbol that Brussels will stand by the Republic of Ireland, once again considered a loyal member state, and support its attempts to bring Northern Ireland more surely under its influence. More importantly, it’s a punishment for the UK for having the audacity to leave the EU. The former Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, claims that the Eurocrats around Martin Selmayr, the commission’s secretary general, were quite open about stating that Northern Ireland would be the ‘price’ Britain had to pay for Brexit.
For some people, it may not seem like much of a punishment. Northern Ireland is heavily dependent upon public money provided by the UK exchequer, the spectre of potential political violence hangs over the province and its politicians sometimes exude a sense of entitlement that hardly endears the place to the rest of the country. Yet the idea that EU negotiators could successfully carve-off a slice of territory is potentially damaging to Britain’s prestige, as well as its constitutional integrity.
The historian, Lord Bew, whose peerage recognised his pivotal contribution to the Belfast Agreement, recently wrote a carefully considered paper for Policy Exchange, explaining how the backstop threatened the principles underpinning that peace accord. It’s an argument that the government has been reluctant to make, as Theresa May and her advisers have allowed the EU and the Dublin government to dominate the narrative around the Irish border.
Belatedly, the prime minister has acknowledged that the treatment of Northern Ireland in her deal is not acceptable. Now she must take that case to Brussels with a directness that has alluded her so far in the negotiations. Nobody wants a harder border in Ireland or a no deal Brexit, but EU intransigence and Irish nationalist designs on Northern Ireland are making both outcomes possible.
