An early sign that Brexit would create problems for Northern Ireland was a joint warning by Tony Blair and John Major during the 2016 referendum campaign. Both men were impeccably credentialed as veterans of the Irish peace process, but their words were not heeded. The issue scarcely registered – not with an English audience. In Northern Ireland, the majority was for remain.
The two ex-prime ministers’ view has been vindicated by events. While England has mostly moved on from Brexit, the Northern Ireland protocol leading to border checks at Irish sea ports sustains diplomatic tension at dangerous heights. Those checks are a function of the treaty that Boris Johnson signed, arising from a recognition that the Good Friday agreement would be imperilled if physical checks were imposed at the border between the North and the Republic of Ireland.
Whether Mr Johnson ever intended to honour his commitments is an open question. Earlier this month, the government unilaterally exempted some goods crossing the Irish Sea from checks. The EU has responded with legal action. The dispute could jeopardise the whole post-Brexit framework agreement.
Neither side benefits in that scenario, and it is avoidable. The starting point is to see the problem as logistical, not existential. To use a term from earlier in negotiations, the border must be “de-dramatised”.
The UK is struggling to uphold its side of the bargain because Mr Johnson was too cowardly to level with people about what his Brexit model meant for Northern Ireland. Preparations for a new border were not made. His denials raised the stakes. Customs checks are too often cast by Conservatives as a threat to the territorial integrity of the UK, as if Northern Ireland’s alignment with EU regulations – a settled fact of Brexit – abets some colonising aggression by Brussels.
That framing makes it all but impossible for the Democratic Unionist party to climb down from its position of rejecting the whole protocol. But the DUP was never happy with the Good Friday agreement. Its baseline analysis of these issues is not one that Mr Johnson should be importing undiluted into government policy.
The EU is also struggling to adapt to the new reality. The European commission was quick to repent after Ursula von der Leyen’s own border blunder earlier in the year, threatening suspension of the Brexit deal over vaccine exports, but the damage was done. A mechanism of last resort should never have been so casually invoked.
There is no precedent for an external border of the single market cutting across the territory of a third country, yet that is what has happened with Northern Ireland. For such an arrangement to work, Brussels needs to have confidence that the UK respects its legal obligations to police the regulatory line, and unionists need to appreciate that it is an administrative boundary, not a partition or a plot to hasten Irish reunification. That mutual understanding can only come about with the cultivation of trust, which is in short supply. The UK government’s behaviour seems designed to deplete stocks even further. Perhaps the goal is to sabotage the protocol so that some renegotiation becomes inevitable, with an unregulated border as a fait accompli.
Mr Johnson might think such a path is available because he faces no sustained domestic political challenge on Brexit. He might also calculate that there is an electoral dividend from confrontation with Brussels. But he underestimates the damage that is done to Britain’s global reputation and the threat to the stability of Northern Ireland represented by his cavalier attitude. Previous prime ministers understood clearly what was at stake. Mr Johnson may be a slow learner, but must now step up to the responsibility that his office demands, and treat the Northern Ireland protocol as an object of international law, not a political game.
