There are contradictory reports about what
the government is or is not planning to do about the Northern Ireland Protocol
this week. Some are suggesting that the PM is telling his ministers to tone
down the rhetoric, and that he will vow
not to scrap the protocol; whilst others are suggesting that he is
imminently going to give
the green light to a new parliamentary bill which will effectively nullify
part of the international agreement which he signed. There might be
circumstances in which ‘keeping the other side guessing’ is a valid negotiating
tactic, but sending mixed messages to a party such as the DUP, which sees
everything in stark black and white terms, before meeting with them isn’t one
of them. Indeed, giving that party mixed messages and a succession of broken
promises rather than honesty about what was going to happen and why is one of
the causes of the current mess. The mixed messages look less like a negotiating
tactic than a reflection of the fact that the PM can’t make up his own mind and
simply veers between options depending on who he spoke to last.
It appears that getting Tory MPs to pass
an Act of Parliament which specifically authorises ministers to over-ride the
provisions of an international treaty that they negotiated and signed up to may
not be a simple task. There are still a few brave souls in the traditional
party of law and order who cling to the outdated belief that abiding by
international law is, on the whole, rather a good thing. And then there is the
House of Lords. Given that this is not a manifesto commitment by the governing
party (indeed, there was a clear manifesto commitment to implement the agreement, not to change it), their lordships have the constitutional right to delay the legislation
for up to a year – and it is highly likely that, with no whipped majority available
to the PM, they will do precisely that.
The measure is likely to be sold to the
dissenting MPs on the basis that the government has no intention of using the
powers which the legislation, if and when passed, will give them; it is merely
a bargaining stick to convince the EU that it must change its stance or else.
Even assuming that a sufficient number of dissenting MPs are persuaded by that
(it does, after all, require them to believe the word of a known serial liar),
it is unlikely that their noble lordships will fall for it. But, not for the
first time, it looks as though the PM and his team have either not thought
through the consequences of their actions, or else are assuming that what
happens in the UK is somehow invisible to those pesky foreigners in Brussels
and beyond.
If they could only try and stand in
the shoes of the EU Commission for just a few moments, they might start to
understand that watching the UK government struggle to get unilateral changes
through its own parliament doesn’t exactly come across as a huge threat
requiring their immediate capitulation. What it does encourage is quite the
opposite: do nothing while the UK
parliamentary drama plays out, with at least an evens chance that the whole
thing will blow up in the face of the UK Government, or even that there will be
a change of government during that year. It also, of course, gives them twelve
months to plan quietly and implement their own response to any attempt to
unilaterally change the rules through act of parliament. The UK government will
in the meantime make the same preparations for implementing its proposed
changes as it did for the Brexit Agreement itself (i.e. do nothing). It will then
come as a complete surprise when the EU, once again, seamlessly implements its
own fallback plan, leaving the UK Government astounded at the inability of
those Europeans to understand just how special the UK is.
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