When is a protocol not a protocol and what can be achieved by sensible negotiation?
The news that the EU and UK seem to have reached a sensible agreement on fishing quotas this year is encouraging. It was tough, neither side got exactly what it wanted, the UK’s fishing industry has again not got what it was promised; but a quietly negotiated compromise was agreed.
Now look at the Northern Ireland Protocol, the UK has been ramping up the pressure ahead of talks on how it should be implemented by unilaterally breaking the agreement, delaying checks, denying the EU vital data and not even building the check points agreed on. All very petty and the exact opposite of what a protocol is supposed to achieve, it is little more than a system of agreed rules and acceptable behaviour. By definition it doesn’t work if one side changes the rules and behaviour agreed on.
The really worrying thing about this is that the UK is also ramping up the pressure by endlessly briefing that the EU is being unreasonable, intractable and is deliberately threatening the Good Friday Agreement as a result. The EU knows it was Brexit that threatened the GFA and that it has only been asking for the UK to follow rules agreed six months ago. There is therefore a limit to how far the UK can push this, it seems to think it can change the protocol by a thousand little cuts and the EU will sit back and let it all unravel.
The EU went a very long way to find a compromise, allowing a non member to patrol its external single market border in Ireland. The UK has done nothing to show it can be trusted and is in fact being increasingly untrustworthy. At some point the EU will walk away from talks and call in the lawyers, the law is on its side. The UK will then have to decide whether to implement the deal it agreed to or abandon it.
If the NIP goes so does the rest of the deal with the EU, a strange case of chicken, which the UK can only lose. It shows what happens when you don’t agree to respect the rules you insisted on yourself, blame your opposite number and then negotiate in public.
The obvious answer is for the UK to comply with EU veterinary standards, but it refuses pointblank to do so, even when it would abolish most checks in NI and make exports of all UK agricultural produce to the EU much easier.
As the fishing agreement shows this could be done and dusted by now
https://jonty.substack.com/
I didn't see the UK make a land grab from another sovereign state as part of Brexit or move the border to the Irish Sea willingly? Your beloved EU has done nothing to show it can be trusted!