10 March 2023

Carnegie Europe's Kellner: Trust and Compromise Return to EU-UK Relations

Sunak’s decision to break with his predecessors’ confrontational strategy has paved the way for an agreement over Northern Ireland. This means new opportunities for cooperation between London and Brussels.

In one important respect, Britain’s prime minister has obeyed Healey’s First Law of Holes. Denis Healey was one of the most talented of British politicians never to become prime minister. He famously advised: “When you are in a hole, stop digging.” His Second Law, since you ask, was: “When your opponent is in a hole and digging, for God’s sake don’t stop him.”

Faced with one of his toughest problems, Rishi Sunak has stopped digging. He has abandoned the stance of his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, toward the European Union and negotiated an agreement to revise the Northern Ireland Protocol. Johnson had agreed the protocol with Brussels in order to reconcile the province’s unique status, as part of the United Kingdom but remaining, post-Brexit, within the EU’s single market. Despite having agreed the protocol, Johnson quickly disowned it. He tried and failed to persuade the EU to rewrite it.

On Johnson’s side were Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and most Conservative members of parliament (MPs). They hated the protocol because trade between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain was subject to customs checks. In the view of the protocol’s critics, this undermined the notion that trade between two parts of the UK was Britain’s business: Brussels and—if a dispute arose—the European Court of Justice should keep well clear.

Johnson and Truss reckoned the best way to assert this principle was to play hardball with the EU. They threatened to pass a new law giving the government the power to rip up the protocol. Brussels did not take kindly to this threat. Negotiations stalled—not just on this issue but on other things, notably Britain’s wish to rejoin the EU’s Horizon Europe program for pan-European collaboration on scientific research. Meanwhile, Stormont—Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly—was suspended because the DUP refused to take part until the protocol was scrapped. All in all, relations between London and Brussels, and also between London and Belfast, were in a Healey-shaped hole, and the digging went on.

Until the last few weeks. Sunak decided to break with the confrontational strategy of his predecessors. He dialled down the rhetoric in his talks with the EU. He dispensed with threats and resurrected two words that Johnson and Truss had buried: trust and compromise. With James Cleverley, his foreign secretary, he built a relationship with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Maroš Šefčovič, European Commission vice-president for interinstitutional relations who is leading the talks with the UK....

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