Brexit Impact on Northern Ireland

I really don't care whether people call it the Irish Sea border or the North Channel border. The name is not the important point here.

The point is that had Brexit requires a hard border and a hard border, wherever it is located, is harmful to NI and harmful to the union. Hard Brexiters don't care about this or, at best, it's a price which they are happy for NI to pay if it means they can achieve something they consider to be more important. Those who do prioritise the wishes, interests and welfare of NI and the health of the union are therefore in an unfortunate position; the best they can manage is a damage limitation exercise; given that hard Brexit is being imposed on NI, what border arrangements will do the least harm?

The answer is, of course, the Irish Sea/North Channel border; it has a much smaller economic and social impact than a land border would. EU and IRL would both have preferred a soft Brexit on terms that required no border at all, but that was not acceptable to the UK, so the best than they could do was to agree Brexit on terms that did not require a land border. And they were only able to agree that because, of course, the UK also recognised the need to avoid a land border; "no hard border" was one of the earliest of the Brexit red lines proclaimed by the UK. That was why the UK, when it insisted on a Brexit that would require a hard border, also aske for the NI protocol, so that it would not be a land border.

The Irish Sea/North Channel border is bad, but it's the least bad option available, given the control of UK policy by a hard Brexit faction which has nothing but disdain for NI and indifference to the Union.

I don't think the risk of assassination in the 70s or 80s comes into it at all. Teresa May entered Parliament in 1997; Boris Johnson in 2000; Liz Truss in 2010. They were appalling Prime Ministers, each worse than the last, but presumably most of the the alternative leaders who might have been elected in their place would have entered parliament at more or less the same time. If it's really true that the Tory parliamentary party was so unremittingly awful that, in an entire generation of MPs, May, Johnson and Truss were the best that could be found, it's a shocking indictment of the party, but its hard to say that the cause of this was some assassinations that took place thirty years before they entered parliament. We'd also have to explain why the assassinations were, after 30 years, still discouraging potentially good leaders from entering politics but were apparently not discouraging the hopelessly unfit.

I think the true explanation is simpler. Since the Tory party switched to having the members elect the leader, the leader has been chosen by an electorate that doesn't know the candidates well, and has no idea which of them can provide effective leadership that will command the confidence of the parliamentary party, which is the primary thing the leader has to do. It's a bad system that produces demonstrably bad results, and it should be changed.

Lest anybody think I'm being partisan about this, I'd argue that the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party shows that the Labour Party has pretty much the same problem. It has just mattered a bit less because they've been out of office for so long.

I think maybe we need to divide unionists into three groups:

1. Those who support the WF (even if they think it needs to be improved)
2. Those who think the WF needs to be improved (but realise that NI is better off with the WF than it would be without)
3. Those who will never support the WF on any terms.

The line between group 1 and group 2 is pretty blurred. It's perhaps really a matter of emphasis — does somebody think first of all/speak first of all about the problems the protocol causes, or the problems the protocol averts?

The line between group 2 and group 3 may also be a bit blurry, but for different reasons. Some people may pretend they are open to being persuaded that modifications to the protocol are good enough, when in fact they never will be. On the other hand, some people may think that by expressing strong opposition to the protocol they maximise their chances of getting some change.

But assume that group 3 exists, and that it includes the TUV and (most of) the DUP. Obviously there's no point in Sunak (or anyone else) reaching out to them or making concessions to them; nothing will ever be sufficient to win their support, so why give them anything at all? You're just wasting your limited political capital.

We find ourselves in the interesting position where someone like downcow takes the view that the modifications in the WF were valuable gains, and that these were secured through the DUP tactics of boycott and bluster. (We could query whether they were in fact won by those tactics, but downcow believes they were.) AT the same time the DUP itself, and many of those aligned with it, say that those modifications are trivial or worthless - indeed, some argue that the WF is actually worse than the unmodified NIP was.

The curious result is that downcow intends to reward the DUP with his vote for achieving something which the DUP itself regards as worthless.

Now imagine you're Rishi Sunak, faced with this overlapping mosaic of conflicting positions which, we have some reason to think, are - ahem - not always presented by those who hold them with complete candour.

I wouldn't really blame Sunak for throwing his hands up at the whole thing. There is no point in dealing with at least some of those he faces in the unionist camp, and he can't reliably identify who those are.

But we've now reached a point where he doesn't need to negotiate with them. What we've learned now is that Sunak's goal - and, more generally, Westminster's goal - in addressing the Protocol is not to secure restoration of the devolved institutions in NI. He's like that, but it's not essential to him. What he wants is a functional relationship with the EU, with the US and with the broader international community so that the running sore of Brexit arguments does not e.g. impede the UK from acceding to the CPTPP, etc. And, hey, he's got that.

The result is that, whether or not the DUP's actions (or inaction) was instrumental in securing the WF, and whether or not the WF was worth securing, those actions (or inactions) won't achieve anything more. Sunak has what he wants. The DUP can dangle the prospect of a return to Stormont, but Sunak doesn't need that, and in any event will be very sceptical that he can get it by making further changes to the WF, since the DUP appears to be in the camp that won't settle for any version of the WF. In effect, the DUP have priced themselves out of the market. They are looking to buy goods that are not for sale, and they have no useful currency with which to buy any goods anyway.