Few aspects of the Brexit saga are more counter-intuitive than the way three successive leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party should have acted in a manner which is shaking the union of the U.K. to its foundations.
David Cameron, by holding a referendum so soon after a narrow escape in the Scottish independence vote, which was certain , whatever the overall outcome, to pit the four nations of our union against one another; Theresa May by deciding at the outset, and without any prior consultation with the devolved institutions to quit the EU’s customs union and its single market, thus greatly accentuating the damage that would be caused by Brexit in any case; and now Boris Johnson by doing a deal which would involve installing a customs border arrangements between Great Britain and Northern Ireland of a kind which both his predecessor and he himself had said could not be contemplated by any British Prime Minister.
Bad enough, you might think, but worse still when you look at the detail. Northern Ireland is to be saddled with an import regime of extraordinary complexity for goods coming from Great Britain or from other countries outside the EU with tariffs having to be paid upfront and not reimbursed until it was certain that they were not going through a duty free backdoor into the EU (and all this controlled by European institutions in which they would have no representation). This will inevitably impose substantial costs on businesses in the province. It is hard to believe that these new arrangements will not, as Jonathan Powell who played a key role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement , has pointed out act as a steadily increasing incentive for the province to become part of, and not just a quasi-colony of, the EU, in which they voted to remain in the first place.
For Scotland, the equation is even worse, despite the fact that they voted to remain in the EU by an even larger majority than Northern Ireland. They will have access to none of the provisions thrashed out for Northern Ireland and will, in terms of their future trade access to the EU be entirely dependent on whatever future deal the government in London May negotiate with the EU – and that government could well turn out to value regulatory independence higher than frictionless trade. Is it surprising that support for Scottish independence was on the rise even before the terms of Johnson’s deal were known?
And Wales, which did vote, narrowly, to leave is equally, like Scotland being discriminated against when you compare their position with the Northern Ireland deal.
This really is a topsy turvy outcome which the Parliament of our union is being pressed to accept. If that union is, as Theresa May so frequently said, precious, as it certainly is to many of us, then the simplest way to strengthen it is to d3cide to remain in the EU or, less conclusively, at least to negotiate a customs union with the rest of the EU.
Edited by Hugo Dixon
Well, it’s a little incoherent but I get the general message – i.e., a Conservative government is bad news for the UK as a whole and the devolved governments in particular. We all knew that anyway. We are here because DC didn’t have the balls to face down his backbenchers, TM invoked Article 50 without any strategic plan to withdraw (even Cummings said that should have taken two years to thrash out) and as for BJ, well, ’nuff said.