A closer look at Britain’s latest Brexit gamble

The British are using the threat of a return to the Troubles to make the EU submit to changes to the Northern Ireland protocol. It’s a cynical, cruel, dangerous gamble, says Sean O’Grady, but it might work

Anti-Brexit protesters wave the flags of the UK, Ireland and EU outside parliament (Getty)

It is remarkable, given the disparity in their relative economic strength, that the UK has managed to squeeze as many concessions from the European Union as it has in the current round of the never-ending Brexit talks. The British government and its unionist allies in Northern Ireland have argued for many months that the EU’s fussy and legalistic implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol was making it unpopular and looking silly. The absurdities of the “sausage wars” symbolised an apparently petty attitude by the EU. The EU bleated about the integrity of the single market, but it was losing the argument in the court of public opinion. They were looking like the unreasonable ones, who didn’t comprehend the delicate peace in Northern Ireland. Somehow, they contrived to make Boris Johnson look sensitive.

Even so, the EU could have stayed firm; but they have caved in. Maros Sefcovic, a European Commission vice-president, has promised “very far-reaching” changes, and so they are. Tellingly he was even candid enough to reveal some of the tensions within the EU when he remarked that: “We have gone to the outer limits of what member states, particularly France, will wear.” President Macron is obviously angry and frustrated, not least about the Aukus “betrayal” and the treatment of French fisherfolk. The EU is abolishing about half of all of the remaining checks in response to British demands. In reality, they were probably also doing so to support the interests of a small member state, Ireland, with the Irish government so anguished about a return to violence in the north of Ireland. In any case, Johnson should be satisfied.

Yet, like all exercises in appeasement, it has only made the beast more hungry. Sensing weakness, the British in the prosaic shape of Lord Frost have been extending their demands, having drafted a new legal text of the protocol, taking the European Court out of its role in the single market, and requiring the EU to accept UK standards in their entirely, and presumably for all time, in Northern Ireland. Any risks to the integrity of the single market are then Europe’s problem, not Britain’s.