What a colossal, devastating failure by British politicians over Northern Ireland. The current impasse—with the Northern Irish Assembly still suspended and another set of elections now required, the second since May—is the product of terrible neglect by the British government starting in 2010, accelerated and deepened by Brexit, which has shattered the delicate power-sharing balance required for functioning Northern Irish institutions. The DUP’s refusal to nominate ministers to the executive is a protest against the new Brexit border down the Irish sea, but the continued shutdown cannot be pinned on one policy so much as years of British complacency.
The rot first set in when David Cameron stood Conservative candidates in alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party, and reached a nadir in 2017-2019 when, to stay in office, Theresa May relied upon Democratic Unionist Party MPs. Both these meant the Tories had planted their flag firmly on unionist territory, trashing the “honest broker” role for the UK which John Major extolled and Tony Blair exemplified.
Trust between the British government and other Northern Irish parties, built patiently over decades, was eclipsed—a sad predicament exacerbated by a casual indifference to local politics. In his effort to build peace in the 1990s, Blair sat in summits for days on end until agreement was reached, but few of our recent Tory PMs have shown anything like the same will to understand. They have been more likely to make flying visits to Belfast for the odd hour and that’s it.
Successive Tory secretaries of state haven’t been much better, with some hardly spending a night there, failing to invest time in the relationship-building so essential to create trust and better understanding. Julian Smith was the notable exception, and it was no accident that he managed to get Stormont resurrected after three years in suspension—until being unceremoniously sacked in 2020 for his successful stewardship because he wasn’t a Boris Johnson toady. That simply reinforced the perception in Belfast that for this bunch of Tory ministers, Northern Ireland is second order.
It was downhill after that. The DUP walked out of Stormont in protest at the Northern Ireland Protocol Johnson negotiated and signed with the EU. He’d committed the cardinal sin of putting the EU/UK border down the Irish Sea, though he pretended he hadn’t really intended that and then denounced the very treaty he’d agreed.
The only other conceivable place for that external EU frontier would have been the border across the island of Ireland—something nobody wanted, because an open border is not only a must for nationalists and republicans, but for unionists too. For nationalists and republicans, an invisible frontier represents progress toward their cherished objective of unification with the Republic. For unionists it represents the banishing of the terrible years of the Troubles and grants easy access to Dublin, from where most Northern Irelanders catch international flights, among many other everyday practicalities.
The crisis unfolding now should not have come a surprise. Northern Ireland always was the Achilles heel of Brexit. Tory zealots had to “Get Brexit done” come what may. Six in 10 Tory party members polled in 2019 said they couldn’t care a fig if Northern Ireland split from the United Kingdom so long as we secured Brexit.
Brexit first and last. Breaking an international treaty you’ve signed with the European Union, and thereby breaking international law? A mere trifle when there’s so much political capital to be made among the Tory base by casting Brussels as the villain. After all, that worked splendidly in the 2016 referendum itself.
The Bill to unilaterally undermine the Northern Ireland Protocol is currently encountering huge opposition in the House of Lords Committee Stage, and may well be stalled at the Report Stage. Because of its grave implications for the Good Friday Agreement, it is opposed by all of the main political parties in Northern Ireland except the DUP and fellow Unionist party the UUP (though the UUP wants negotiations to improve it, not to scrap it and, also unlike the DUP, would enter Stormont right away). It is also opposed by the business community, which fears even greater disruption and instability, and by civil society groups, who have been trying to make the Protocol work.
Yet the Protocol’s rough edges could have been fixed if only Boris Johnson and Liz Truss had had negotiated seriously, instead of posturing and dog-whistling to their party’s hard right. Will Rishi Sunak behave differently? Or will he also be imprisoned by backbench hardliners?
Tory proposals for “green lanes” for goods from Great Britain destined for Northern Ireland only have been all but accepted by the EU, with the “red lanes” requiring customs checks restricted to the small minority of goods likely to go over the Irish border into the rest of the EU. So why doesn’t Number 10 simply negotiate the fine detail, including sharing real-time data with Brussels, which it has so far refused to do?
Because Irish and EU ministers simply don’t trust their British counterparts. And why should they—until London eats some humble pie and stops playing to the populist gallery?
The EU must make concessions on how the Protocol is implemented—and is clearly ready to do so, if London ever gets into serious and intensive negotiations. But despite their vocal opposition to a hard sea border, Johnson and his ministers dragged their feet for months and months when the DUP was pushing them to negotiate changes. Some DUP leaders have told me privately of their utter frustration at London’s failure to grasp the solutions on the table.
For me, the nagging question is whether Sunak, unlike Johnson and Truss, will be prepared to make the compromises needed to reduce the extra costs and checks currently required, when that would probably entail upsetting the Tory Brexiteers? Yet if Tory posturing were replaced by proper process, solutions could be found.
Unionists understandably feel their identity and political security is threatened by trade checks with other parts of the UK, and London’s failure properly to engage has raised the stakes, especially for the DUP, some of whose leaders feel they have been backed into a corner. But the DUP has never complained about the light-touch controls on the movement of plants and livestock that have long been in force between Great Britain and Northern Ireland—a “border” of sorts necessitated by the island of Ireland being a single, distinct biosphere.
They also worry, quite reasonably, that Johnson’s Brexit deal means rules being made in Brussels over which Northern Ireland has no say. But the answer is surely to grant Northern Irish ministers and legislators consultative rights both in Brussels institutions, through the Joint EU-UK Committee overseeing the Protocol, and by adapting existing cross-border bodies in Dublin.
There is a consensus in Belfast on one thing at least: all the parties want the Protocol changed and its implementation smoothed, so that Northern Ireland can continue to enjoy the best of both worlds: in the UK and EU single markets.
We must always remember, however, that the hard Brexit which both Johnson and Sunak endorsed was intended to allow the UK to diverge from EU regulations. That means Northern Ireland diverging increasingly from the rest of the UK, which is unsettling for the DUP—but then they voted for it.
