Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Two of Boris Johnson’s most reckless chickens are coming home to roost. To get hard Brexit into law and topple his predecessor, Theresa May, he told Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party that he would allow no border in the Irish Sea. He promptly allowed one, and signed a protocol to the Brexit deal to that effect. An enraged DUP is duly refusing to let the new Northern Irish executive take office until that border goes. Johnson is now threatening to unilaterally renege on the protocol, in turn enraging the EU by flagrantly breaching the withdrawal deal. Precisely this trap was built into hard Brexit from day one. Everyone knew it. It was classic Johnson. He lied his way out of each scrape, sacking or ennobling colleagues according to taste.

The absence of a new executive in Belfast leaves open the prospect of direct rule from London. If Johnson fails to dismantle the EU-ordained border controls at Belfast docks, the DUP will stall power-sharing. If he gives in and allows the world’s goods to flow freely into the Irish republic, the EU has threatened to retaliate in an all-out trade war. The question is what new “constructive ambiguity” – a euphemism for fudge – Johnson can conceivably fashion to get him out of this mess.

Amid all the shouting and screaming of Brexit, quiet voices were warning: don’t forget Northern Ireland. The Brexiters dismissed it as a historical trifle. Since the UK would have tariff-free trade with the EU, the Irish border would be “frictionless”. No problem.

Of all the deceits of hard Brexit, none was more blatant than the word frictionless. Johnson in effect ceded authority over the 40% of Britain’s trade that is with the EU under the pretence that he was “taking back control”. But it takes two to trade. Hundred-page forms and hours-long queues at Dover have been the result, with similar friction at the Belfast border. The M&S chairman, Archie Norman, protested last week that a staggering 700 pages of forms is required to get two trucks across the Irish Sea from England, requiring eight hours of work by 20 staff. The reality is that any border is a border, offering any number of impediments to trade. The EU was furious at hard Brexit. What on earth made Johnson think it would make his life easy?

The prime minister’s first decision must be to call the bluff of the DUP’s intransigent leader, Jeffrey Donaldson. Stony-faced unionists have been the bane of British prime ministers back to Lloyd George. In 1921, the territory was gerrymandered to deliver a perpetual unionist majority, and the resulting one-party rule has caused Britain little but trouble. At this month’s local elections, that historic act of gerrymandering failed. An exhausted electorate split the unionist vote three ways; Sinn Féin has emerged in pole position. It could one day lead Northern Ireland, with care, towards eventual reunion with the south. Donaldson faces an existential threat and has nothing to lose.

The Good Friday agreement of 1998 achieved peace by embedding power-sharing between the nationalist and unionist constituencies. With each side having a veto, it has constantly broken down and cannot survive formally without the leading unionist bloc, the DUP, in play. At the same time, Northern Ireland’s government is reportedly a shambles. In particular, its health service is delivering some of the worst outcomes of any part of the UK: just last week it was reported that the number of people waiting for more than 12 hours in A&E had doubled in a year. Somehow the logjam must be cleared.

Johnson has to demand that Donaldson return to Stormont or that Northern Ireland must be ruled without him. Until power-sharing returns, with first minister designate Michelle O’Neill in post, London must find a mechanism for re-establishing the executive, with a role for O’Neill. This might involve some sort of “ghost” executive under the formal aegis of the Northern Ireland secretary. The reality is that democracy in Northern Ireland is starting to change, and in a welcome and more open direction. London has ruled its Irish territory abominably for over a century. It owes it help towards a new dawn.

The short-term question remains whether Johnson can say anything to the unionists sufficient to entice them back. For most in Northern Ireland, the border is not the chief political issue. It has been replaced by the cost of living and the state of the health service. By the same token, it is clearly worth attempting yet again to plead with Brussels’ better nature to find some partial compromise on the border question. The present controls are indefensible.

Hard Brexit was a mistake, a crude and casual gesture by Johnson to prop up his leadership bid. He showed no sign of knowing what “hard” might entail. But then there were few remainers ready to support “soft” Brexit as a halfway house. As it is, Brussels negotiators have clearly been instructed to play tough, subjecting British trade to a nightmare of barriers and bureaucracy. These are palpably beyond anything needed to protect standards, health and safety. At the same time, there is no reason for Britain not to accede to standards that it has shared with the rest of the continent for half a century.

The proposals reputedly offered by the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, to ease the Belfast border are reasonable but inoperable, in the absence of the EU’s agreement. They embrace licensed “trusted traders”, and red and green lanes for vehicles intended to go on to Ireland and those remaining in Northern Ireland. A modicum of supervision should be able to protect the EU from global trade contamination. There is no need to chase trawlers across the high seas or follow British number plates through the lanes of Louth and Donegal. Surely there is compromise somewhere here.

Europe has enough on its hands without the distraction of a childish trade war with Britain. Yes, Britain is to blame. It chose to leave the EU, but the EU should respect that. In addition, Johnson personally interpreted Brexit as leaving Europe’s economic trade area, for which he had no mandate. That decision is costing Britain dear and one day will, I am sure, have to be corrected.

For the moment Johnson owes it to Northern Ireland to free it from the mess into which hard Brexit has condemned it. In doing so he could yet set it on the road to political reconstruction. That at least would be a silver lining on the Brexit cloud.

The EU could impose tariffs on UK fish and agricultural goods in just seven days if Boris Johnson goes ahead with moves to disapply parts of the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol, legal experts have said.

The short, sharp shock is one of the three key retaliatory weapons available through the trade agreement, according to Catherine Barnard, a professor of EU law at Cambridge University.

1. The nuclear option – end the trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) using articles 770 and 779
These clauses allow the EU to terminate the entire trade agreement, spelling the end of tariff-free trade in both directions along with all the other elements of the deal, including 90-day visa-free holidays, and the fishing agreement.

It would essentially return the UK to a no-deal Brexit scenario, with damaging consequences including the suspension of police and security cooperation, a serious move with long-term consequences for EU-UK relations.

As this requires a year’s notice, it may not appeal to member states who want to show they have real teeth in the face of what they consider an act of bad faith by the UK.

2. Finger-on-the-button option – article 521
This would allow the EU to suspend the trade parts of the TCA, leaving all the other areas agreed last December, including visa-free holidays and police cooperation, intact.

Again, this option may not appeal to member states as it would not deliver the practical objectives to demonstrate that the EU has teeth.

“It seems to me unlikely that they would do this because, frankly, if things have got so bad that the EU is talking about terminating part of the treaty it seems unlikely that they carry on cooperating in the other areas,” says Barnard.

3. Trade war in a week – article 506, paragraph 2
This allows the EU to “suspend, in whole or in part”, access to its waters.

Such a response may have nothing to do with Northern Ireland, but Barnard says: “The advantage from the EU’s point of view is that you only have to give seven days’ notice,” so a trade war could be started within a week.

Moreover, article 506 allows for wider retaliation if deemed necessary. If the EU considers a suspension of fishing around the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man “commensurate to the economic or societal impact of the alleged failure” of the UK to comply with the threat, it can suspend tariff-free trade “in whole or in part”.

In other words, it could slap tariffs on fish and other goods within seven days.

But is it an either/or situation?
The treaty governing current trading arrangements – the trade and cooperation agreement – gives considerable powers to either side to terminate the relationship. Barnard says: “They [the EU] could do them all at the same time but it is more likely that they may try to escalate matters.”

For the EU to be considering pressing the button on any of the options just 18 months after the UK left the bloc with a trade deal is remarkable in the history of trade disputes.

“If you look at the World Trade Organization, the number of disputes between states is relatively small,” Barnard says. “The whole purpose of dispute resolution mechanisms is to resolve arguments, and that’s why you have those provisions in the withdrawal agreement and the TCA. But instead of talking about resolution, we are talking about ratcheting up the arguments to the point of terminating the treaty. It is extraordinary.”

The UK’s food safety regulator has been forced to bridge gaps in its data after losing full access to EU alerts when the UK left the trade bloc, a watchdog has found.

A number of information sharing arrangements with EU regulators ceased on Britain’s departure from the union, with UK bodies, including the Food Standards Agency (FSA), moving to put in place alternative systems as a result, according to a new report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

The UK regulators say the loss of data access has negatively impacted their ability to assess risks and carry out their work, the watchdog said, and have turned to international systems, publicly available information and case-by-case arrangements to make up the difference.

The NAO report explored the impact of Brexit on three regulators: the FSA, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

It said all three have been forced to assume “significant new responsibilities” as a result of the country leaving the EU, with HSE now the main regulator for chemicals in the UK, the FSA taking on an expanded remit for assessing food safety risks, and the CMA faced with larger and more complex competition and merger cases.

They are all finding it challenging to recruit the specialist skills they need in some key areas, the watchdog found, with HSE, for example, expecting it will be another four years before it reaches the full capacity it has planned for its post-EU exit regulatory regime.

And, having used EU databases for regulatory activities, the FSA, CMA and HSE all identified loss of data sharing arrangements as having a “negative impact” on their ability to assess risks or carry out their work, the NAO said.

For example, at the end of the Brexit transition period, the FSA lost access to parts of the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF), which it used to exchange information about food safety risks and responses across the EU.

The NAO said access was also lost to the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES), which provides information on imports, and the Alert and Cooperation Network, which allows for exchanges of intelligence and requests for assistance on food fraud issues between EU member states.

As a result, it said the FSA has put in place alternative mechanisms for identifying and escalating risks, and for exchanging information.

But when it comes to sharing data on food safety incidents across the globe, the FSA estimates it needs 65% more full-time equivalent resources to deliver the same result achieved with the EU’s system, the NAO said.

The regulator confirmed this was the case, but clarified the increase represented only three additional staff.

The FSA expects new data sources to improve its ability to identify food safety risks, but it is “at an early stage in embedding their use”, the watchdog added.

The NAO said the Government has set out a broad ambition for regulatory reform, but until long-term strategies are fully developed, there is a risk that regulators’ current plans to meet operational challenges may be “wasted effort”.

Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “EU exit has had a major impact on many UK regulators.

“They need to overcome many challenges if they are to manage the transition successfully, including recruiting the right specialist skills.

“It is essential that regulators and policy-makers develop their future strategies as soon as possible to avoid wasting effort on short-term work and to ensure the decisions they make now meet their longer-term goals.”

Meg Hillier, Labour MP and chairwoman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said: “EU exit has heaped more work onto UK regulators, yet progress is hampered by shortfalls in skills and the door being closed on EU data sharing.

“There is a building tension between the high-minded talk of new Brexit freedoms, and what it means in practice for regulation.

“Clear long-term strategies are needed to avoid short-term wasted effort.

“Government must clearly light the way to prevent regulators fumbling around in the dark.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “The UK will use its regulatory freedoms to become the best regulated advanced economy in the world.

“Free from EU law, our country now has the opportunity to deliver bespoke UK-orientated regulation that is focused on delivering the people’s priorities.

“As part of this, we will ensure our regulators are fit for purpose and working as effectively as possible.”

FSA chief executive Emily Miles said the regulator had ensured at all stages that food remained safe.

“We no longer have full access to EU data alerts, but we now link with more than 180 countries for food safety notifications, while also receiving third-country notifications from the EU,” she said.

Pascal Lamy says row is solvable if PM stops using emotional Brexit politics to solve ‘technical problem’

Boris Johnson’s row with the EU over Northern Ireland’s Brexit arrangements is “absolutely solvable” but only if the UK accepts that a border is inevitable, the former head of the World Trade Organization has said.

But Pascal Lamy said the prime minister could only achieve a breakthrough if he stopped mixing “oil and vinegar” and throwing emotional Brexit politics on to what he said was essentially a technical problem.

Lamy said he did not understand the UK’s strategy, which risked a trade war with the EU, but added that it was unlikely to come to this as the “cost-benefit ratio” was “ridiculous”.

If matters did deteriorate and the EU retaliated with sanctions, the bloc would win as those with greatest capacity for trade generally did, Lamy said.

His comments, in an interview with the Guardian, came after the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, threatened new laws to allow the UK to change some of the Northern Ireland protocol. The UK government has come under pressure from the Democratic Unionist party and the Traditional Unionist Voice, both of whom campaigned on an anti-protocol ticket in the recent Northern Ireland assembly elections.

Lamy, who has followed Brexit closely over the past seven years, and who is now president of the Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit organisation, after leaving the WTO in 2013, said demands to remove the border in the Irish Sea completely would never deliver a breakthrough.

“I don’t understand exactly what they [the UK] are after,” he said. “If it is no border it won’t work. You cannot leave the EU and not have a border. That’s just having your cake and eating it.

“So there is a question mark as to what exactly is the problem on the UK side. If it is ‘we don’t want a border’ then it is like saying: ‘We don’t want Brexit.’ Then this is unsolvable.”

Lamy continued: “The UK government has this capacity to mix problems and to cook a political soup.

“These are oil and vinegar issues between emotion and technicalities. Emotion is extremely high because Boris Johnson keeps beating the drum to say Brexit is a great thing. He has to increase the sound of the drum to say Brexit is a great thing all the time.”

If the UK admitted a border was the direct consequence of Brexit, then a solution could be found, Lamy said.

There could be a dynamic solution for Northern Ireland, he suggested. This would involve a “thin border” with few checks on trade across the Irish Sea while the UK remained aligned to EU standards. This would become a “thick border” if the UK wanted to diverge from those standards, Lamy added.

This solution would require equivalence in standards with the EU and has already been rejected by the UK as unacceptable because it would compromise the country’s control of its own laws.

Lamy said this went to the core issue of borders between nations and always involve tradeoffs.

“The UK are torn between their political position, which is they want to have the capacity to diverge [on standards], and the technical consequence of that, which is a thicker border,” he said.

The only way to solve the issue was to “dial down the emotion” and “let the technicians find the solution that allows both sides to find a midway between a thick and a thin border”.

Given the border between the UK and the EU was not negotiable, the UK’s best shot at a solution was to “play for time, as you can’t play with money”, Lamy said.

Solutions included trusted trader schemes that would would “transport the border up the value chain” and light-touch checks at ports.

“Customs officers only have a limited amount of time in the day. It’s about finding a compromise between ensuring control on one side and trade to flow on the other,” Lamy said.

The EU ambassador to the UK has rejected Liz Truss’s demand that the Northern Ireland protocol be rewritten, and issued a blunt warning of retaliation if the government passes a law disapplying aspects of the agreement.

“Unilateral calls for unilateral; action calls for action,” João Vale de Almeida told journalists at Westminster.

He lamented the continuing distrust between the two sides, and argued little had changed in the past 18 months since the government was threatening to pass the internal markets bill.

“I’m worried about the low levels of trust that exist today, between the EU and the UK: between our leaders, between all of us that are involved in this relationship,” he said.

“Some people call it a saga. If this is a saga, if I look at the new season of the saga, it looks pretty much like a similar plot. Not much has changed.”

“We have the same narrative,” he added. “Using legislation to override an international treaty. I feel myself back in the fall of 2020, with the internal markets bill.”

Vale de Almeida insisted there was no prospect of a change in the negotiating mandate given by the EU to its Brexit representative, Maroš Šefčovič – a demand made repeatedly by the foreign secretary.

“We were told that we should get a new mandate. Well, I can tell you very clearly, what the member states are telling us is very simple: you don’t need a mandate, and even if you ask for one, you will not get it,” he said.

“We can’t renegotiate the protocol: the ink on the signatures is hardly dry”.

Truss set out her intentions in a dramatic statement earlier this week, in which she said she preferred a negotiated solution but set out plans for a bill that would rework aspects of the protocol.

The stakes in the dispute have been raised since the DUP refused to take part in a power-sharing executive at Stormont unless the protocol is radically altered.

Changes mooted by the government include creating a “green channel” to allow goods to pass without checks from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, as long as they are not destined for the Republic of Ireland. It would give the UK more powers to change VAT in Northern Ireland.

But Vale de Almeida rejected the proposal. “The problem with this approach, we believe, is that it does not necessarily solve any problems, and it most likely creates more problems.”

He suggested instead that the UK government return to proposals for applying the protocol already made by the EU. Truss rejected these as making the situation worse – but Brussels said ministers have not yet fully engaged with them.

“We believe that what we put on the table, the potential of those proposals is not yet exhausted,” the ambassador said. “There is untapped potential in those proposals for us to find solutions – provided we are focused on finding solutions.”

He argued that rocky relations over the protocol were having a knock-on effect on other aspects of the UK-EU relationship – including the UK’s participation in the Horizon programme of scientific cooperation.

Acknowledging the importance of UK scientists to the scheme, Almeida conceded that it was “collateral damage” in the standoff over the protocol.