David Frost and Brandon Lewis's article about the Northern Ireland protocol in these pages last Saturday has, as Frost noted this week, "aroused much interest", little of it positive. Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney said it showed no generosity towards the European Union after Brussels agreed to extend a grace period on the movement of chilled meats from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
Former taoiseach John Bruton said Frost appeared not to have read the agreement he negotiated with the EU and was refusing to take responsibility for it. The opinion piece was, as Coveney put it, “a very strange way to make friends and build partnership”. But that was not its purpose.
Frost and Lewis’s article, along with the British ambassador’s outing on RTÉ Radio the same day, are part of a diplomatic effort to make clear Britain’s position on the protocol in the bluntest possible terms. The message to European capitals is that London wants far-reaching changes to the way the protocol is implemented and that modest easements to reduce friction on the Irish Sea customs and regulatory border will not be sufficient.
Britain's approach, based on assessing the likely risk of goods crossing the Border into the European single market, is incompatible with the EU's rules-based approach
The briefings have included warnings about the threat of loyalist violence if the EU fails to agree to the dramatic changes Britain claims are necessary to reduce unhappiness about the protocol in some communities in Northern Ireland. Do EU member states really want to roll the dice on a return to violence rather than drop what Frost calls their “theological” approach to implementing the protocol as agreed?
Frost this week denied that his government was encouraging street protests in the North by talking up the difficulties created by the protocol.
“We don’t accept and don’t agree with any suggestion that we’re attempting to sort of create tensions in Northern Ireland. Absolutely not. Everything that we’re doing is behaving in a responsible fashion to try to manage the situation which affects everyone in Northern Ireland,” he told Policy Exchange, a think tank close to the Conservative Party.
He acknowledged that as Britain’s chief negotiator, he had agreed to “applying the law of another territory within our own territory” and that it would be policed by the EU institutions and European courts.
“We were always clear that there were processes to protect the single market and support the other aspects of the protocol. That was part of the deal. The issue is how those processes are to be operated,” he said.
Britain’s proposals
Within the next two weeks, the British government will outline its proposals on how to implement the protocol after the extended grace period on chilled meats expires at the end of September. Frost has already ruled out a Swiss-style sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) deal that would eliminate 80 per cent of checks but would require Britain to shadow EU food safety laws.
He is expected to call for a system based on each side recognising the equivalence of each other’s standards, with a mechanism to reimpose checks if one side’s standards drift downwards. Britain also favours an expansive trusted trader scheme that would allow big supermarket chains to avoid most of the bureaucracy required by the protocol.
Britain’s approach, based on assessing the likely risk of goods crossing the Border into the European single market, is incompatible with the EU’s rules-based approach which is at the heart of its single market. Frost’s proposals are likely to call for the effective abandonment of many of Britain’s obligations under the protocol and Whitehall knows that the EU will reject them.
The success of Britain's strategy of brazening it out will depend on the patience of its European interlocutors and their willingness to rewrite their own rules
The expectation in London is that negotiations on the protocol will reach another crisis in the days approaching the chilled meats deadline on September 30th. The appetite for unilateral action has diminished since the United States issued Frost with a diplomatic ticking off ahead of last month’s G7 summit.
The language used by Frost and Lewis in recent days suggest they are building an argument for invoking the protocol’s Article 16 on the basis that it is being implemented in a way that contravenes its own text. But the expectation in Whitehall is that such a move will not be necessary.
London is operating on the basis that there is no stomach in Europe for a fight over the protocol and that a few nights of brinkmanship at the end of September will produce a fudge that will see the EU agree to a further extension of grace periods.
European leaders have warned Boris Johnson that resolving the issues surrounding the protocol are a prerequisite for improving Britain’s relationship with the EU. He agrees but suggests that it is their responsibility rather than his.
Multidimensional relationships
Angela Merkel’s meeting with Johnson last week, accompanied by a bilateral agreement on foreign policy and a plan for joint cabinet meetings once a year, was a reminder that Britain’s relationships with other European powers are multidimensional. London is increasingly confident that the other elements of these relationships, including security, defence and foreign policy, are too important for Paris or Berlin to escalate the dispute over the protocol in a way that could really hurt Britain.
The same logic applies to Washington, where British officials are more dismissive than before of the role of Irish-American politicians in influencing the Biden administration’s approach to the protocol. They are confident that, if they avoid unilateral actions that are in clear breach of international law, they can persuade the US that European intransigence rather than British backsliding is responsible for the impasse.
The success of Britain’s strategy of brazening it out will depend on the patience of its European interlocutors and their willingness to rewrite their own rules to accommodate a difficult neighbour.
As it has been from the day five years ago that Britain voted to leave the European Union, Ireland will be a pivotal actor – and a potential casualty.
Denis Staunton is London Editor