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The TCA, signed in 2020, remained deliberately silent on future cooperation in several key policy areas, and both sides have had to juggle the impact of a new agreement upon their trading relationship with the consequences of a global pandemic.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that the EU does not simply have a relationship with the United Kingdom as a whole. As a result of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland negotiated as part of the Withdrawal Agreement of 2019, it enjoys subtly different relations with Great Britain on the one hand, and Northern Ireland on the other. And it is the fallout from the Protocol that continues to dominate the broader relationship between the EU and the UK.
At the time of writing, the two sides find themselves in a stand-off over the UK’s insistence that the Protocol is not working and will need to be either renegotiated or unilaterally amended. Given the insistence of the EU on the need for technical negotiations to address practical problems, and its consequent refusal to contemplate the amendment of the Protocol itself, the British Government unveiled legislation allowing it to unilaterally overturn parts of the agreement. In response, the EU has threatened retaliation.
It has been a long and bumpy road from the referendum of 23 June 2016 to where we are today. The story of much of that intervening period has been recounted many times and does not need retelling here. Suffice to say that the sheer length of the Brexit process, and the bitterness and polarisation it engendered left the UK profoundly divided between rival political camps calling — respectively — for a second referendum and a hard Brexit.
Boris Johnson’s election as leader of the Conservative Party ensured the latter outcome. This in turn raised the thorny issue of the so-called Northern Ireland ‘trilemma’. Simply put, absent something approximating Single Market and Customs Union membership (negotiated by Theresa May in the form of her infamous ‘backstop’), the choice was between a border on the island of Ireland (rejected by both the UK and the EU) and some kind of special status for Northern Ireland that obviated the need for intra-Irish checks, consequently requiring them between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Mr Johnson opted for the latter. However, the way he did so — denying that the Protocol would necessitate any checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland — laid the foundations for the bitterness that was to follow.
The Withdrawal Agreement containing the Protocol was agreed on 17 October 2019 and came into force on 1 February 2020. From April of that year, the EU– UK Joint Committee that it created negotiated how precisely the Protocol was to be implemented. Even before those negotiations started, the UK had produced a Command Paper (in May 2020) that argued for flexibility when it came to the frequency and complexity of checks on agri-food moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
Because the Joint Committee did not come to an agreement until 10 December 2020, the two sides agreed on some ‘easements’ to allow businesses time to adapt.