Tories Claim Yet Again That Brexit Is ‘Done’ as Dubious Northern Ireland Deal Struck

Brexit
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Jack Montgomery

Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party have claimed yet again that Brexit is “done” after yet again securing changes to the way the European Union’s continued power in Northern Ireland operates.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland have been suffering the negative effects of an EU-controlled internal border being imposed between them, causing the province’s power-sharing regional government to break down. This is a result of the Northern Ireland Protocol which governs the British province post-Brexit — a deal negotiated by ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, although in reality a barely modified version of a previous deal cut by Remain-voting ex-Prime Minister Theresa May.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the Brexit-supporting main British Unionist party in Northern Ireland, has refused to form a government with Sinn Féin, the pro-EU main Irish nationalist party, in protest at the way the Protocol undermines the integrity of the United Kingdom, meaning the region has no legislature or executive at present.

The Conservatives under Johnson, successor Liz Truss, and incumbent leader Rishi Sunak have long been slow rolling a bill empowering the British government to disapply elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol in order to deal with the issues it has caused — but Sunak has now announced that he will be scrapping it, for a supposedly amazing new deal (details still to be fully worked out) dubbed the ‘Windsor Framework’.

Supposedly, the Windsor Framework will put an end to the situation in which seemingly maliciously over-enforced checks on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland — the two essential halves of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as the state’s name would imply — disrupt intra-UK commerce, by making it easier for GB goods, pets, and so on not intended to travel beyond NI into EU Ireland to cross the Irish Sea unbureaucratically.

The current Protocol was intended to do the same thing, of course, so the actual results produced by the supposedly smoother new arrangements — which will require additional layers of bureaucracy higher up the chain described as “increased market surveillance” — are not guaranteed.

What is clear, from the European Union’s side, is that EU law upheld by EU courts and judges will continue to hold sway where the application of Single Market regulations and state aid rules are concerned — something the British government apparently believes it can get past the DUP and Conservative Brexiteers by creating a so-called “Stormont Brake” — Stormont being the seat of Northern Ireland’s regional government.

This “brake” will allow the British government to veto new EU rules following a process begun by at least 30 out of 90 regional legislators in Northern Ireland from at least two parties petitioning against the impact they will have on everyday life in Northern Ireland.

Rumours suggest the DUP — who only have 25 such legislators on their own — may be willing to accept this supposed compromise, but questions remain around the fact that the Windsor framework stipulates that the brake “will not be available for trivial reasons: there must be something ‘significantly’ different about a new rule, whether in its content or scope, and MLAs [Members of the Legislative Assembly for Northern Ireland] will need to show that the rule has a ‘significant impact specific to everyday life’ that is liable to persist.”

Who the MLAs will have to prove their concerns are non-trivial to before they can even attempt to pull the Stormont Brake remains to be seen — if it is Westminster, Northern Irish eurosceptics will remain powerless to stop a weak or actively europhile British central government from selling them out; if it is the EU, permission is unlikely to ever be granted; and if it is, say the Speaker of the Assembly at a time when a pro-EU party holds the speakership, as is currently the case, permission is equally unlikely.

While British figures such as Nigel Farage have already expressed doubts about the Windsor Framework, Breitbart News has spoken to Dr Gunnar Beck, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Germany with an academic background in EU law, who also believes the new deal “appears to be a defeat for the hard Brexiteers”.

“EU rules will continue to apply to VAT and excise duties in Northern Ireland, with some very limited exceptions. The Stormont Break will only be able to be used in exceptional circumstances and as a last resort, to be decided by 30 MLAs… from two different parties, and it will only apply to new EU legislation,” he suggested, based on his reading of the currently available text.

“Furthermore, the Commission and the European Parliament seem willing and ready to retaliate if the UK ‘dares’ to trigger the Stormont Break,” he continued, further noting that the European Court of Justice “remains the sole and final arbiter for EU rules, even in Northern Ireland.”

“The current compromise, that both the British government and the EU ‘commit themselves politically to use everything they can to avoid disputes reaching the ECJ’ seems a compromise that cannot satisfy the [British] Unionists and the Brexit hardliners in the Conservative Party,” he suggested — although he added that the EU is “firmly convinced however that the agreement will receive wide support, including from the Tories and the DUP.”

Indeed, while some Brexiteers in both parties may find themselves persuaded that the deal is a good one — or to pretend that they think it is — others have already come out against it.

Ian Paisley, a high-profile DUP MP, had told the BBC it “does not cut the mustard”, with journalist Nicholas Watt paraphrasing him as saying that the Stormont Brake is “in the boot of the car under the spare wheel and impossible to reach”.

This story is developing…

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