16th February 2023

The news is promising:

So let us think what would happen if – and it is an if – the Northern Irish Protocol issue is ever resolved.

(And some of you will doubt it ever will be.)

As it stands the focus of the post-Brexit relationship is Northern Ireland and the protocol.

The government of the United Kingdom is seeking to be able to break international law for the sake of doing something about the protocol.

The government is also telling its political and media supporters that it will withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights as a distraction, it seems, from any compromise on the protocol.

Everything in UK-EU relations – at least on the United Kingdom side – appears to be governed by the protocol.

So imagine: what if that issue was no longer there?

What then?

The cynical will think that there would have to be a new issue for the governing party to rally support of Brexiters: that a new dispute with the European Union will be raise, even contrived, and off we will go again.

Maybe.

But there would also be the possibility of the pragmatists and realists to guide policy and move on to what needs to happen next: a sustainable basis for a close UK-EU relationship.

The preference of this blog (ever since the referendum result) has been for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union and to move quickly into the closest possible association agreement, with as much participation in the single market as the European Union will allow us and which the United Kingdom government can also get past its supporters.

Negotiations for such an ideal arrangement should ideally have started by now, and discussions need to start by the time the periodic review of the relationship begins under the withdrawal agreements.

A deal on the Northern Irish Protocol will enable this grown-up and sensible discussion to (finally) take place.

Ho, ho.

Of course, this side of a general election there is little prospect of the government openly seeking a closer relationship with the European Union.

But such a close relationship would necessarily require the Northern Irish Protocol to be practically settled first.

(By “practically settle” I mean that the tensions and frictions occasioned by the protocol have viable work-around solutions – for, as this blog has averred before, the ultimate issue of there being a post-Brexit trading border on the island of Ireland can only be solved by Irish unification – or by the United Kingdom rejoining the European Union.)

And there would then need to be a period where the United Kingdom approach to policy is – frankly – less crazy than seeking to break international law as leverage so as to get its way in a dispute.

United Kingdom policy and politics on Brexit would need to calm down for a while.

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Any deal in the coming weeks on the protocol between the United Kingdom and the European Union will also need to survive attacks from the Democratic Unionist Party and some of the government’s own backbenchers.

These attacks may delay the issue being practically resolved – but these attacks may be time limited in their potency.

But until such attacks do become politically impotent, it may be that practical resolution of the Northern Irish Protocol issue will happen, but not just yet.

We will have to wait.

(In the longer term, of course, the issue of there being a trading border on the island of Ireland probably will be resolved by Irish unification.)

And if the Northern Irish Protocol issue is practically resolved then we perhaps can have fresh and interesting conversations about our post-Brexit relationship with the European Union.

Gosh.

Imagine that.

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