Brexit protocols we hope we won’t need
What a strange pass it has come to: Ireland’s Government and civil servants have spent days and probably nights drafting a highly-detailed, voluminous package of legislative proposals that will be applauded and welcomed by everyone on this island — and by our neighbours across the Irish Sea — yet it’s a bundle we all hope can be binned or, perhaps, just left to gather dust in a ministry archive.
The bill, with 15 sections and covering nine government departments, is necessary to ensure that the damage caused by the UK leaving the EU on March 29 without an agreed divorce settlement is limited to such an extent that cross-border travel, health services, welfare payments and other mutually beneficial arrangements continue without interruption.
In part, the legislation reiterates the Ireland-UK common travel area, first created in the 1920s and more recently, in 1997, legally recognised in the EU’s Treaty of Amsterdam. The all-island electricity market will be protected, our students in the UK will continue to get support grants, and crime suspects on both sides of the sea hoping to avoid extradition will be disappointed. Some comfort for farmers comes from Brussels, which says it will permit our government to increase state-aid grants should higher limits be necessary.
The revolts being seen this week in both of the UK’s major political parties, however, provide no clues whatsoever as to whether or not the measures in this emergency act will be necessary and, anyway, it’s not at all clear what, if any, progress is being made by British and EU negotiators. London says the talks have been constructive, but the Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, while warning of “terrible economic and social consequences” for both the UK and the EU, owns up to being not very optimistic about the prospects for a backstop provision that satisfies Irish and EU concerns and — crucially — those of the House of Commons that remains all at sea and where members have been busy shifting the deckchairs.
How the revolts by both Tory and Labour MPs will change the maths on any revised exit proposal brought back from Brussels is in no way clear, since the Labour defectors have a basket of motives and gripes — of which Brexit is just one — while all three Tories are zealous Remainers who, strangely, were content to be elected in 2017 supporting a Conservative Party manifesto that promised to deliver the UK’s exit from the EU as required by the country’s 2016 referendum. Adding to the confusion, the latest Labour defector says he will not sit with the independent group the others have formed. A question yet to be asked in Britain is why these rebels, claiming what they say is the centre ground, have not joined the centrist party that’s already there — the Liberal Democrats? Their 11 MPs have been constant in their quest for a second referendum, also known euphemistically as a People’s Vote.
The smart money, then, must — as the clock ticks down to March 29 — be on the outcome unwanted by all those involved, thanks in part to the loss of Ms May’s parliamentary majority in 2017, her reliance since then on the DUP, and the two years she has wasted negotiating an exit agreement that she ought to have known would have no chance of approval by the House of Commons. Our Government, of course, is hoping for the best but has planned carefully for the worst.
