The Prime Minister faces unpalatable options this week: lose the DUP and ERG by making yet more concessions to get a deal with the EU; or lose moderate Tories by trying to crash out of the EU with no deal at all.
The scraps of information emerging from the government’s negotiations with the EU are not encouraging. Boris Johnson has already made three biggish concessions in his desperation to get a deal, but they are not enough. First, he said Northern Ireland would follow the EU’s agrifood rules. Then he agreed it would follow the bloc’s manufacturing rules. Finally, last week he said the UK would collect tariffs on goods that entered Northern Ireland from Great Britain.
All this is a massive pill for the DUP to swallow, as it effectively turns Northern Ireland into a “vassal province” of the EU – following its rules without a vote on them. So Johnson has tried to sweeten the pill by promising that Northern Ireland businesses will be able to reclaim any tariffs that are paid so long as the goods they bring in from Great Britain stay in Northern Ireland.
What comes to Northern Ireland stays in Northern Ireland?
It’s this “rebate” idea that the EU negotiators are taking aim at. How can they be sure that any goods brought into Northern Ireland will stay there? What is to stop a car dealer, for example, importing a car from Nissan in Sunderland and reclaiming the 10% tariff the EU charges – but then driving it across the border into the Republic of Ireland and from there to anywhere in the EU? After all, Johnson has promised the Irish prime minister there will be no border controls in Ireland.
The problem doesn’t just apply to finished goods. It applies to inputs. Say a manufacturer brings sugar into Northern Ireland and uses it to make fizzy drinks and then sends those to the Republic and other EU countries. How are the authorities going to stop the company reclaiming the tariffs on the sugar? Unless they do, won’t the Northern Ireland fizzy drink maker get an unfair advantage vis-a-vis competitors elsewhere in the EU?
Solving these problems and coming up with a legally-binding text before the European Council on Thursday seems extraordinarily unlikely. That’s why the EU is suggesting that, if the Prime Minister wants a deal done and dusted by then, he should forget about the rebate idea and just keep Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs union.
But it is hard to see Johnson agreeing to that. His DUP allies would scream betrayal. And the ERG “Spartans”, the hardest of hardline Tories, would refuse to back him too. His chances of getting such a deal through Parliament would then be vanishingly small. Why would he even bother to burn his bridges with his hardline supporters if he can’t get MPs to support his plan?
What about kicking the can?
Another option would be to play for time. The Prime Minister might be able to persuade the other leaders to keep talking about his proposal – and agree some legally-binding variation of it in the next couple of months. Even Raoul Ruparel, the former Theresa May advisor who has done a lot to explain the proposal, accepts that it will need time to iron out the details.
But there are problems with that too. For a start, the EU would probably require intrusive procedures and hefty fines to minimise the risk that goods which received rebates ended up in the bloc. By the time the whole bureaucratic rigmarole was put in place, the rebate scheme might not be terribly attractive for Northern Ireland businesses – and the DUP would be furious.
Then there’s the fact that Johnson has said until the cows have come home that we are leaving the EU at the end of October “do or die”. If he now asks for extra time to negotiate a cockamamie scheme, Nigel Farage will say he can’t be trusted and have his guts for garters in a subsequent election. Johnson will start to look like Theresa May, who was endlessly kicking the can.
No deal not so great
The snag is that not doing a deal is also deeply unappealing. The Prime Minister has been given “explosive” warnings about the risk of terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland and the mainland by Michael Gove and the national security advisor if there’s no deal, according to the Sunday Times.
Quite apart from that, Johnson knows he will split his Cabinet and his party if he fights an election on a “no deal” platform. A number of Tory moderates are aghast at the damage to the country and the economy from tearing us out of the EU without a deal.
What’s more, it’s not even certain that he could persuade Jeremy Corbyn to let him fight an election. The Labour leader is one of the few senior figures in his party who actually wants one. Most of the others are coming round to the idea that it would be best to have a referendum first.
So the Prime Minister is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. What on earth is he to do? Faced with a set of really bad choices, might he conclude that a People’s Vote is his least bad option?