13 June 2023

UKandEU's Usherwood: Necessary but not sufficient: The Windsor framework and UK/EU relations

Drawing on his remarks at the UK in a Changing Europe Annual Conference, Simon Usherwood analyses the Windsor Framework and what it tells us about Sunak’s approach to the UK’s relationship with the EU. 

The town of Windsor is full of potent symbols of the British state, but the place doesn’t actually matter much in the practical running of the country.

So too with the Windsor Framework, signed in February this year and flagged as an important (and positive) development in the relationship between the UK and the EU. While it seemed to address many of the concerns around Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status it neither puts to bed the various question marks about constructive British engagement with European counterparts, nor does it mean that Brexit is ‘done’ and that the issue will return to the nerdier corners of Westminster.

Instead, it represents a return to a more classic mode of British European policy: pragmatic, but somewhat rudderless.

Windsor’s unblocking

The Windsor package – already enacted in all its parts after a coordinated effort by both parties – reflects the general approach of Rishi Sunak to the situation he inherited from Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

This approach can be usefully understood as putting effort into projects where a clear political win can be secured (and be seen to be secured), while holding other issues in limbo.

The arguments over the Northern Ireland Protocol since 2020 were driven in large part by Johnson and his casting of himself as someone viscerally opposed to any action that could be seen as working with the EU (or ‘Europe’ more generally). This meant that there was no political incentive during this time to try to find a mutually acceptable solution.

The difference made by his departure in the summer of 2022 was visible even during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, with her attendance at the European Political Community summit in Prague and the simple mention of the EU as a key ally in her speeches.

At the same time British technical capacity to deliver on pragmatic improvements to the Protocol also increased, seen most publicly with the much-delayed delivery in early 2023 of a real-time monitoring system for goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.

As such, Sunak was well-positioned in autumn 2022 to use the impending 25^th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement to move to a new settlement with the EU.

In substantive terms, the Framework is quite modest. Easements on checks and on the application of EU law in Northern Ireland were welcomed by traders. But the Stormont Brake and  increased EU consultation of local stakeholders certainly don’t address the concerns raised by some in the Unionist community about the Protocol. The Brake allows the Northern Ireland Assembly to request that the UK government  not apply specific new EU rules in Northern Ireland if certain conditions are met, which is a far cry from Unionist demands to scrape the entire Protocol. Indeed, it is notable how little legal amendment of that text there is, with even the use of the Windsor name not making it into statute.

Instead, the Framework reads like a document that it would have been possible to conclude in 2020, had the British government been willing and able to pursue a negotiated operationalisation of the original text: the technical capacity was delayed as much by Westminster dithering as anything else. Certainly, it is not the fundamental reworking (or rejection) that Johnson and others had pressed for.

UKandEU

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