A Northern Ireland-only backstop is unlikely to break the Brexit impasse

Boris Johnson insisted during the Conservative leadership campaign that the Brexit withdrawal agreement struck by his predecessor needed more than mere keyhole surgery. He wanted full amputation of the Irish “backstop,” the part of Theresa Mays’s deal that would keep the UK in a customs union with the EU and Northern Ireland in parts of the single market if the two sides could not agree a future trade deal to keep the Irish land border soft. “No to time limits or unilateral escape hatches or these kind of elaborate devices, glosses, codicils and so on which you could apply to the backstop,” he told a leadership hustings audience. “I think the problem is very fundamental [...] It needs to come out.”

He set expectations high, and his party’s backbenchers have been giddily raising them even higher. In fact Mark Francois, a Tory MP and a member of the pro-hard Brexit European Research Group (ERG), said in July that “if there were any attempt to revive the Withdrawal Agreement, even without the backstop, the ERG would vote against it.”

Yet there are now excited whispers that Johnson’s negotiating team may be working on something backstop-like, poised to rebadge it as the first part of a bumper free trade deal. “We recognise that for reasons of geography and economics, agri-food is increasingly managed on a common basis across the island of Ireland,” the prime minister told the House of Commons at the start of September. “We are ready to find a way forward that recognises this reality.” In other words, Northern Ireland could keep applying single market rules on food, leading to checks across the Irish Sea if Great Britain were to ditch those rules.

The prime minister’s remarks have raised hopes in some quarters that he may be ready to pivot to a backstop that applies only to Northern Ireland, and has no application in Great Britain. The EU has said that such a deal would be a runner with Dublin and Brussels—in fact, it is what the European Commission first proposed in February 2017.  There are also new political incentives for the UK government to leave with an agreement, and soon: now that the so called “Benn Act” is on the statute book, the only alternatives to a deal are for the prime minister to seek an extension to the Article 50 period, breaking his central campaign pledge to leave the EU by Halloween, or to resign, ushering Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. 

There are, however, huge obstacles. For a start, alignment on agri-food is nothing like a full solution to the border problem. Trade in other goods needs to be addressed, too: would Northern Ireland stay aligned with EU rules on machine parts as well (as is already provided for under May’s reviled backstop)?

More importantly, a plan for single market regulations is not a plan for customs duties, where the political nightmare lies. Johnson has said that he does not want a customs union with the EU. In that case, there will have to be a tariff wall either on the Irish land border or in the Irish Sea. One is anathema to Ireland and the EU, the other to the Democratic Unionist Party and those Conservative MPs with unionist instincts.

Some Conservative MPs exaggerate their unionism in order to placate the DUP, but the prime minister would need opposition to an Irish Sea border to shrink dramatically in order to get a majority. May’s deal was defeated by a margin of 58 votes at the final time of asking, and with the prospect of a general election on the horizon in which a party advocating a second referendum might win, there are lower incentives than ever for Remain-supporting MPs to cave and support a deal they dislike to avoid a no-deal they would loathe. Johnson and the EU may be ready to back a backstop and stop calling it a backstop—but the real challenge will be to get the backing of Mark Francois.