Handling a slippery customer

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The 'victory' which the PM has secured in the revised agreement with the EU reminds me of the one secured by the trade union leader who, after negotiating at length with the employers, came back to tell his members “I’m afraid that I haven’t been able to get us a pay increase – in fact, I’ve had to accept a pay cut.  But the good news is that I’ve got it backdated”.  Boris Johnson has indeed managed to get rid of the infamous backstop, but, as the Irish Times put it, “The price Johnson has paid for killing the backstop is his acceptance, as the default position, of the very thing – Northern Ireland in the EU customs union – that the backstop would, if activated, have produced.”  He’s taken a solution which was designed to be temporary (until such time as a trade deal was agreed with the EU) and made it a ‘permanent’ one, thereby obviating the need for the temporary solution.  (The ‘permanence’ of the arrangement is, of course, subject to a periodic vote in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the EU is theoretically taking a gamble in depending on that.  However, given that the decision is to be taken by simple majority and given that demographic change is moving slowly but inexorably in one direction – against the DUP – the bet is a fairly safe one.)

The question is why he has given so much ground so suddenly; it’s a complete turnaround from what he has said in the past.  There does seem to be an outside chance that enough Labour MPs will have been bought out by the promised reductions in workers’ rights, environmental regulations etc. (compared with the better protection that they were offered by Theresa May) to be willing to support the deal this time round for him to be able to get it through parliament in principle tomorrow, potentially freeing him from the requirements of the so-called Benn Act, but then what?  There is a great deal of very detailed legislation that needs to be passed, and if parliament rejects that after agreeing to the deal in principle, we are left facing no deal.  For those who suspect that ‘no deal’ is still the PM’s preferred option (not because he believes it best for the UK, even he isn’t that stupid: it’s all about minimising the vote for the Nigel Farage plc Party), getting agreement and then seeing the legislation fail might be exactly what he wants.  People are quite right to have their suspicions about his motives.

There is also another possibility, raised by Craig Murray, who suggests that “Legal Advisers have been asked about the circumstances constituting force majeure which would justify the UK in breaking a EU Withdrawal Agreement in the future. … The situation that Johnson and Raab appear now to contemplate is agreeing a “backstop” now to get Brexit done, but then not implementing the agreed backstop when the time comes due to “force majeure””.  In ordinary times, with an ordinary Prime Minister, I would find it incredible that any PM would sign an international agreement with the advance intention of then breaching it almost immediately afterwards, but with Johnson, who knows?

For all of Johnson’s display of confidence that he has the numbers, none of us know what will happen tomorrow, least of all him.  But given his long-standing proclivity towards dishonesty, MPs can and should make sure that they ensure, in as watertight a means as they can, that they tie his hands in such a way that he cannot frustrate the will of parliament, whatever that turns out to be.