Just over a month ago, the media reported that Rishi Sunak had assured Joe Biden that the issues surrounding the Northern Irish Protocol would be resolved by April.
Why that deadline? Because it will mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast (‘Good Friday’) Agreement.
Lots of people want to make a big deal out of this. The President himself is reportedly planning to visit the United Kingdom to celebrate. It would be quite embarrassing if the institutions set up under that treaty were non-operational, and the cross-community political consensus it was supposed to build visibly in tatters.
As I wrote at the time in Red, White, and Blue, the Prime Minister was offering a hostage to fortune, because there is no way he can actually guarantee a resolution by that deadline.
Even were he minded to simply roll over for the sake of no longer having to think about Ulster – and you can bet there are plenty in government who would – that wouldn’t do it. To get Stormont back up and running, the Democratic Unionists need to agree to go back – and they are adamant that they will not do so until their concerns about the Protocol are addressed.
Since then, it’s been all quiet on the West Brit front. We’ve caught intermittent snatches of that positive mood music those involved like talking about, but there has been no concrete evidence of actual progress.
That leaves us trying to read the entrails. Was Sunak’s visit to Northern Ireland last week for “informal discussions” with local party leaders significant? No, Whitehall sources say, it was just that he hadn’t been yet and it needed to be done before Christmas.
What about the alleged pausing of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill? Whilst some I spoke to admit that it is helpful not to have it scheduled – it avoids cutting across that mood music – there is apparently not a deliberate hold. Part of the explanation is apparently that the Bill managers are trying to plan for what will be inevitably be a brutal round in the House of Lords.
According to one Whitehall insider with an insight into the process, the Government’s ideal timeline looks something like this: EU revised mandate pre-Christmas; intensive negotiations in January; deal is circulated in early February and signed off mid-month; the Executive comes back in March; big quarter-centenary party in April.
Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it looks like one of those three-stage profit-making plans where the middle step is just a series of question marks.
Revised mandate? The EU have given no indication, either in public or to those I spoke to in government, that they intend to accept the need for text changes; if they don’t, the above ideal scenario falls at the first hurdle.
Some in Whitehall suggest a big, headline retreat may not be necessary. There could instead be a fudge, where Brussels accept proposals that breach the mandate without formally amending it.
And sources close to the DUP point out that the space for a shift from the EU is there: analysis of new data from the EU Access system the new HMRC database tracking goods crossing the Irish Sea, found that “at least 85 per cent of goods arriving in Northern Ireland from Great Britain stay in factories or shops in the region”, according to the Guardian.
If people just needed new evidence to justify changing their stance then sure, there it is.
But that is a dubious proposition. The UK has already been simply not enforcing much of the Protocol for years, more than long enough for any dangerous distortions in the Single Market to show up. None have, and nor would we expect them to given the relative size of it and Northern Ireland. But that hasn’t affected the EU position a jot.
It’s like the old adage about politicians favouring general economies but specific expenditures; everyone is in favour of a deal in principle, but not in detail.
If the EU continues to hold firm, there doesn’t seem to be a firm idea of what the alternative is. Westminster decision-makers apparently accept that there would be little use in burning goodwill and political capital trying to sell a deal that the DUP (not to mention the European Research Group, whose own red lines we reported in October) won’t accept.
But nor does there seem to be the will to really take things to the wire with Brussels, let alone a strategy in place to do so. (The delay to the Protocol Bill, even if otherwise explicable, won’t have strengthened the impression that London is girding itself for battle.)
A third option would be that the DUP were induced to fold by other means. Bribing the local parties back into Stormont has been Westminster’s approach to previous crises, and Biden may apparently offer US investment in the Province to coincide with his visit.
But nobody in Belfast or Westminster thinks that’s a realistic prospect, not least because the President has decided that the best person to front America’s economic initiatives in the region is Joe Kennedy III, whom the Daily Telegraph reports is “a self-described Irish republican”.
Which leaves the most likely-looking outcome, at this point, the same one which has marked the entire process: another deadline from the Government coming and going, accompanied this time by a noisy chorus of (Irish-)American disapproval and lots of head-shaking by Blair-era éminences grises who wanted to hold the hand of history one last time.
A Brexiteer such as Sunak, who made a point of referring to Ulster activists as “my fellow Britons” at the Belfast hustings in the summer, ought to be strongly incentivised to find a solution (i.e. a settlement that actually addresses Unionist concerns, rather than one that somehow steamrolls them.)
Sources close to the DUP point out that not only is an unresolved sea border is the perfect excuse for Labour to scale back the Government’s Brexit freedoms agenda, but their party is the only one remotely likely to support the Conservatives if the latter can claw the polls back to a hung parliament after the next election.
But as we’ve said time and again over the past few years, there is no pathway to that if the Government lacks either a plan for action or the will to enact it. At present, there still seems to be little evidence of either.