This week the long-running saga of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was the last piece of the jigsaw in the even longer-running saga of Brexit finally reached a resolution. It has taken far longer than it should have done for the European Union to discuss these issues, but we should welcome the fact that they are now being constructive and therefore welcome this agreement in a spirit of goodwill.
The Withdrawal Agreement that Boris Johnson agreed with the EU back in 2019 recognised that the challenges in Northern Ireland created special complexity and the need for particular arrangements. There is a lot of cross-border trade on the island of Ireland between North and South but Northern Ireland is also part of the United Kingdom and has an even closer trading relationship with the other parts of the United Kingdom. To try to square the circle, it was accepted that Northern Ireland might find it beneficial to keep many of its technical rules closely aligned with the EU in order to facilitate cross-border trade with Ireland without the need for paperwork and checks and the agreement had provisions to allow the UK and the EU to continue to work together to make these arrangements work in practice. The problem was that the EU had point-blank refused to engage in the substance of these tricky technical issues. Therefore, for no justifiable reason, the EU maintained that Scottish seed potatoes should be totally banned from sale in Northern Ireland even though they have the highest health status in the world; they attempted to say that oak saplings raised in England should be totally banned from sale in Northern Ireland for no justifiable reason; they tried to ban the sale of British sausages and chicken nuggets from sale in Northern Ireland; they said that blind people with a guide dog would need to get a complex pet passport with all sorts of vaccinations if they wanted to visit Northern Ireland which was just wrong, and they tried to enforce all sorts of bureaucratic paperwork for goods sold in Northern Ireland which was unjustified.
There were multiple attempts by the British government to get the EU to discuss these issues sensibly to find mutual solutions as the original Withdrawal Agreement envisaged but all to no avail. As long ago as July 2021, the government published very detailed proposals which addressed all of the legitimate concerns the EU might have in a sensible and pragmatic way, but we still couldn't get the EU to discuss it. That is why, in the end, we had no alternative but to introduce the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which gave the government the powers it needed to unilaterally strike down areas of EU law. It was the only viable response to the EU intransigence at that time. It seems to have done the trick in unlocking things and, when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, there was a change in the mood-music and a chance to turn over a new leaf for both sides and good progress was made.
The agreement announced this week is remarkably close to what the Government proposed in July 2021 and that is why I support it because I was involved in drafting the original version. It means that goods destined for supermarkets in Northern Ireland no longer need any paperwork but can just travel through a "green lane" unencumbered. Lorries travelling on to Ireland would go through checks and need paperwork as would be expected. The ban on seed potatoes, oak trees and guide dogs has all been swept away along with a plethora of similar nonsense and there are some new safeguards that allow the Northern Ireland Executive to block future EU law if they don't like it with an emergency brake mechanism.
I campaigned for us to leave the EU because I wanted us to become a self-governing country again, but I always wanted to reconcile and heal our country after a bruising and protracted debate, and I also wanted us to restore friendly relations with our European neighbours. There are so many problems that the world faces that we must put the rancour of the Brexit debate behind us. It has been a long and difficult road and has been very divisive but maybe, just maybe, this agreement marks the end of that argument and a new beginning for the UK as an independent country but with a close friendship with our neighbours.
