17 May 2022

FT's Wolf: Boris Johnson must embrace the Brexit he made

In his general election campaign of 2019, Boris Johnson promised the country that he would “get Brexit done”. He has failed. Once again he is planning a law to allow him to repudiate parts of the UK’s Brexit deal on Northern Ireland, on which he campaigned. This would destroy the UK’s reputation for keeping its word, invite a parallel EU repudiation of its free trade deal with the UK, enrage the Biden administration and divide the west.

At the time of the referendum campaign in 2016, the then Irish foreign minister remarked to me that the EU is a “peace project”. It was true of France and Germany. It was also true of Ireland and the UK. The fact that the Republic and the UK were members of the EU had made borders almost irrelevant. This had facilitated the peace process and might even be what made it possible.

“You break it, you own it”, as the late Colin Powell told George W Bush before the invasion of Iraq. This possibility did not seem to cross the minds of Brexiters. Brexit would disrupt the EU ties between the two countries, which had facilitated the Good Friday Agreement. The Leave campaign ignored this issue. Remainers mostly did, too. But they had the excuse that they were not proposing to wreck the relationship.

To their credit, Tony Blair and John Major, joint progenitors of the Good Friday Agreement, warned of the consequences of Brexit in a visit to Londonderry in June 2016. Blair argued that the only alternative to controls on the land border “would have to be checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, which would be plainly unacceptable as well”. Major warned it would be “a historic mistake” to do anything that risked destabilising the Good Friday Agreement. They were both correct. Alas, they were ignore.

After the referendum, the Brexiters insisted that their narrow victory mandated them to choose the hardest possible Brexit, whatever its cost. They rejected the single market. They also repudiated Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, which would have kept the UK in the customs union. Only last week, May reminded the House that “I put a deal before the House that met the requirements of the Good Friday Agreement and enabled us not to have a border down the Irish Sea or between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.Sadly, the Democratic Unionist party and others across the House chose to reject that.”

Among those “others” was the ambitious Johnson. Once in power, Johnson made his deal to “get Brexit done”, the one he now wishes to change unilaterally. Then he said that “Northern Ireland has a great deal. You keep free movement and access to the single market but you also have unfettered access to GB.” But he was determined to take access to that very single market from the rest of the UK. He also insisted his “great deal” would not mean border controls in the Irish Sea, though it obviously would. What he should also have known is that the greater the divergence between the UK and EU — over phytosanitary regulations, for example — the more onerous those border checks would have to be. Is he unable to admit these self-evident realities even to himself? ...

more at FT

© FT plc