Steven Barrett

Is Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal all it’s cracked up to be?

(Credit: Getty images)

Rishi Sunak’s ‘deal’ on the Northern Ireland Protocol is finally out. My first impression is that it is no ‘deal’ at all: the version of the text published by the government is a document with no legal effect that is possible to enforce. It’s a wish list of vague commitments.

The document is patronising in places: it refers to ‘saving money on a pint of beer, buying Cumberland sausages in a supermarket or visiting a garden centre for seeds and plants’. But there are also deeper concerns. Take paragraph 52: 

We also recognise, as we have done since 2020, that the Government needs to ensure that we monitor and tackle risks of regulatory divergence within the UK internal market‘          

The chance that the UK might, at some point, have different laws from the EU is described as a ‘risk’. It focuses here on internal divergence; but divergence internally only happens if we diverge from the EU – do you see how that works? This is the idea that the UK might diverge from the EU and pass a law that is better than one passed by them. Given that Brussels rolled back animal welfare standards, put in place to stop mad cow disease, is that so hard to imagine? 

EU laws will continue to apply in Northern Ireland

This fear amounts to the opposite of sovereignty or independence from EU law. It is what the EU has demanded since the referendum: ‘Sure, leave (after you pay us), then do as we say,’ it effectively says. Now we appear to be falling into line.

But perhaps the most worrying part of this ‘framework’ is the difference between the EU text and the UK version. The latter is a soup of words. Indeed, anyone interested in knowing what the EU has done – and what our government has agreed – is far better placed reading the EU text. Here we find the truth about the ‘deal’:

The envisaged amendment does not amount to a change of the essential elements of the
Withdrawal

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